Hi guys. It's been like, what, three months? Not a long absence by Neocities standards. I got bored doing my usual thangs and reading through my usual online haunts, and I felt like working on something more meaningful than curating a folder of images. So here we are.

What did you change?

• After several hours of reading though good documentation, questionably helpful documentation, and intuiting script files by just reading though it, I am pleased to announce that I was able to integrate the Zonelets blogging engine, along with a variation created by a user that introduces a tagging functionality. This is a big, big upgrade over the previous method of creating and updating pages completely manually.
• I added five new bird photos from a recent outing and removed a bunch of old photos that really sucked. I'll retake them eventually.
• I finally managed to figure out how to style the Chattable <iframe> ! Now it isn't just black and white, but changes styles based on the selected theme. Neat.
• I removed the Brutalist theme. It was originally made as an experiment to try out a font I made, Enigma. Until I have an actual use for it though, it'll remain in a folder on my hard drive.
• The <title> 's of webpages has been made more accurate to the page content, so now every tab doesn't just say “webbersite”.

What did you change that I don't really care about?

• I started using Github to deploy website changes. Not too notable but it makes pushing updates a breeze.
• I changed the method of displaying website changes, photography updates, and IRL life changes. It previously used the <details> HTML tag, which is okay for one-off dropdowns (i.e. what they are designed for), but I realized that there could be a better way for displaying that kind of information… like Zonelets.
• When I would upload new photos and place them on the website, they would be in differing sizes, which meant that the watermark I put on them would be inconsistently sized; they were either too small or too big. Now, I've rectified the issue so that all images are downscaled slightly to a specific size, thereby keeping the watermark text a reasonable, consistent size. Shoutout to FastStone Image Resizer for being a no-nonsense bulk image processor.
• After getting a new camera, I realized that the filenames from my previous camera would eventually conflict with the filenames from my new camera (as both are incrementally named with every shot, ex. IMG_001, IMG_002, etc.). To prevent this issue, I just changed the filenames based on DateTaken EXIF data. Easy!

What's next?

• First and foremost, because of how much easier making text-based posts is thanks to Zonelets, I'll add more blog-type posts much more frequently, which is something I think I'll enjoy doing. Expect a review of the previously mentioned new camera I purchased to be posted sometime within the next… sometime.
• Also, while the temperature outside is really fucking hot, I'll be going outside more often to take pictures of birds, architecture, and other things like that.
• As mentioned above, I'll retake the photos of bird species that I removed, minus the shitty lens of a video camera that coats everything in a horrid layer of chromatic aberration.
• As for the website itself, a small issue: sometimes when you change a theme, then click on a new page, the theme reverts to the previous theme. I don't really know what causes this as I'm not very well versed in JavaScript, but I don't think it should be too hard to rectify.
• I'm debating on whether to modernize the older update logs from before this update to new Zonelets webpages. Is continuity that important? My inner data archivist/OSINT scraper side says yes.

Also please PLEASE leave messages on the Chattable embed. When I load up Neocities and I see a new comment, it makes me go from :/ to :D