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How I do Stuff

Jan 13, 2021:

When you find something cool, interesting, unique, save it! Don't worry too much about "legal stuff regarding media", just know what kinds of materials will trigger some kind of bot (usually copyrighted materials, even obscure stuff), or stuff that the owner will fiercely defend. Indie photographers and musicians are known to be some of the most ferocious defenders of their stuff, for instance. So anyone using their materials for "stock media" will probably face trouble.

The least-messy way to gather materials, is to make a folder for each browsing session. I generally have monthly folders for images, texts, the like. Sometimes I make a folder specific to one day or subject.

Textpads are vital. I always have several notepads open, find all kinds of good things to save in there. If you're going to rehost text files, note that some characters (namely "foreign" punctuation) might explode horrendously. Might as well use "search and replace" to strip away the original authenticity and assimilate the text file so it won't be ugly and harder to read.

Overly large images, I tinker with them. I try to slightly enlarge images with text, increase contrast, and try to export as .png, the lightest file I can get. Sometimes that doesn't work out, so I just upload the whole image and a thumbnail. The reason the thumbnails are so small is due to scale. Next to the text, which is just default, 500px is pretty huge. Ugly. The sense of size and scale is off, so 50px thumbnails are barely recognizable, and they fit in with the text, and don't be too big. Plus, it's kinda rude to just force someone's browser to load 2MB or more. No one likes a page that loads 40MB, unless you're on a video page.

Now that I'm going to limit my Internet usage to 1 hour per day, that gives me more time to think, and I'm less focused on immediately updating ASAP. Plus, I always end up leaving in mistakes. I can hammer out the kinks better, when I'm not tempted to screw around OTI.


Dec 07 2020:

What caused me to start up this site, which I should have done ages ago, was someone posted something really cool and neato, and it's somewhere in the Nov '20 section. And that's a bit of a rough section, I'm glad it's not bigger than it is. The Dec '20 section will be so much simpler. I can barely foggily recall what was so fascinating about whatever some rando posted a month ago, that made me stop procrastinating. I just decided to make a site to share cool stuff, and it became a very fun and easy experience! I hadn't done HTML for a long time, since I stopped using Neopets and LiveJournal. Back in Neopets days, I used to grab CSS and whatever weird codes people used for their garish sites. Today, I don't even bother.

So I got a few "types" of pages that I write up real fast. Standalone articles that are easily adapted into whole series. If I write a lot, I just turn the original page into a subindex. As in, I do all my pages locally, make sure all the links work and images load, I do this on Notepad and in local folders, then I upload. Sometimes images take a while to "register". Or sometimes, cluster uploads don't work. Best to do it in small batches. I just let the mood strike me, because I'm a horrible procrastinator, and there's always something I'm avoiding. Minimalistic approaches really makes things so much easier.

There are the standalone pages that would probably take a long time to follow up on. Then there are topic lists that are made to be frequently updated, with very short sentences. But I don't come up with enough stuff on the spot. The entries on the list pages are easily linked from, if I decide I got enough material to make a page out of. Sometimes when I'm rambling on some big, amorphic topic, I come across a small, easily explainable thing, so I stop the main ramble, and throw something together real quick. Just a few thoughts, some searched images, some more thoughts, links, update indeces. Always update the indeces! Makes your site easily navigable. Make it as reader friendly as possible!

Icebergs are fun, but I haven't messed with those in a while. Really, I'm not a huge consumer of media, or a super knowledgeable person, I just know the basic overviews I know, and have thoughts and memories, and repeat stuff other people have said. Icebergs are still rad, though. It's just they tend to be really specialized.

So, there are standard pages, topic overview list pages, indeces, and the occasional galleries that pop up, if I have some really good SFW images to share.

Yeah, that's about it.

Dec 2020

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