dev diary: web dev and goodbye to cohost

i've been doing a lot of work on my website lately! i redid my guestbook (pic above) and added lots of new pages i'll talk about below. but first...

last week it was announced that cohost will be going read-only on october 1st and fully shut down before the end of the year. i wrote a post about what that means for me, but obviously it's going to be deleted in a few short weeks, so i'll have to repost it somewhere and update this link later.

the short version is i will be off social media after cohost is gone. it's sad, but right now i'm answering lots of asks and having a good time posting. going out with a bang!!

RIP asks...

i've posted a lot of my ask doodles in my monthly art posts here, and earlier this month one of those turned into a whole storyline... i called it "fast food au" and i archived it on my website.

the reason i put the archive version together right away was because i wanted to make it easy for people to read in the future, and trying to read it on cohost was really difficult because you'd have to navigate back to the beginning of the tag to even start... and it was a LOT of posts......

i'm glad i made the web pages so quickly though, because it would've been really daunting to go back through it on a deadline! they announced cohost was shutting down literally RIGHT after moxdonald's finished... meaning i won't get to do another ask event like this anytime soon. it's really a shame, but the fact that this story was so fleeting was part of what made it good i think.

after putting the moxdonald's pages together, i was really happy with the layout i came up with and wanted to reuse it for some of the art gallery pages i hadn't made yet. i thought about finally putting together a page for my old disgaea 4 fan art, but there would've been A LOT to go through...

instead, i made a cute starry flowers gallery!

i have more galleries on my site, but i haven't uploaded everything yet. i think i want to transfer the other ones to this new layout as well (especially so you don't have to wait for 50 images to load on one page lol). but that's for later on...

once the cohost shutdown was announced, my "how to get into neocities" post started going around again. i already archived this post on my blog! a lot of cohost users would prefer to make a personal site rather than join (or re-join) one of the big social media sites--and i feel that way too. but getting into web dev stuff is a HUGE hurdle... it made me want to try to help bridge the gap a little, and make the transition a lot smoother for people willing to try it.

so i made neocities templates!

there are three so far, all available to preview and download on my website! it's SEARINA, cassia, and nil. a toffee one is in progress, and i'll probably reuse some assets from the starry flowers gallery to make a periwinkle one as well!

i spent a day or two putting these together, and new ones have gone a lot more quickly since i can copypaste an existing template to build the next ones. but they're SOOOO cute...... my pride and joy......... i had such a relaxing weekend getting to work on these, and i feel very fulfilled.

part of the reason i wanted to help people move from cohost to somewhere like neocities was because a lot of fans of my games joined cohost purely because i was on there. it will be a lot harder to follow updates from me after cohost shuts down, since the only place i'll still be posting is here on patreon (where you have to pay)... but neocities has a social-media-type feed that shows you when sites you follow update their pages. since i still plan on updating my website a lot, i wanted to encourage people to make a neocities account as a way to get updates more easily.

that, and... i just really think everyone should give making a personal site a chance! i don't think it's for everyone, but you get to express yourself so much and learn valuable coding skills while doing it. i always try to encourage people to be creative and make things they might be too afraid to try making, because making things has always made me really happy. so i hope people have fun with my templates--i'll keep making more as long as it keeps being fun for me haha.

that's all for now

no gamedev updates this week since i've spent all my time drawing, posting, and building cute webpages. gosh, i hope that's okay... still trying to get a syrup 2 build done before the end of the month. otherwise, i'm spending my time saying goodbye to the one social media site i felt safe and comfortable on... really wanna keep posting while i can, since after that, i don't know when i'll get to party in a public online space again haha.

thanks for reading~