Odd how I, the author of my last blog, also struggled with motivation for this. I could say it's because of how much time it takes me to put out 2 or 3 posts on Warrior Cats Online, and that claim is true, but a lot of it is time-wasting, so it's a pathetic excuse for leaving this so late into the month. There is also the fact I've been somewhat indecisive of what to actually write for this month, even if I have a few ideas in my head (that I seriously need to write down before I forget), so I thought I'd make it a simple one: an update on my website, and any plans going forward. No custom CSS this time, maybe even going forward, as I do need to get this out before the end of the month, and it has unfortunately proven to be of a hassle, as nice as doing all these themes has been. I'll just save it for my profile for the most part.

dwinterwolf.com

Hosting And Domain Updates

I know I went back and edited the SpaceHey blog post with the new URL, but I don't believe I've done the same for FriendRewind... but it's here, I have the dwinterwolf.com domain! No more dwinterwolf.nekoweb.org, no more dwinterwolf.w10.site, just dwinterwolf.com! It should hopefully break less links should I want to switch host in the future, and it means I'll be able to host my own mail server should I ever gain the expertise to do so... [email protected], anyone? I've also switched away from Nekoweb, partly in case I ever need to mark the site as NSFW (for violent content only, I refuse to touch pornography for religious reasons) as if that option is toggled, it becomes inaccessible to people from the UK, and as an English person myself, I want my countrymen to be able to see my creation without needing to use a VPN... as well as me! The other reason is because the only real perk I might have required in the future from the paid tiers were increased storage space, but I'd say the former is the major one personally. The new host I found was Web1.0 Hosting, and so far I'd say my experience has been pretty good! It's by no means as polished as Nekoweb, and it takes a few clicks to open a file sometimes, but I've gotten used to their Web FTP option by now, and I quite like the system overall. Another thing is that it costs a lot less to get space, since that's the only real paid perk you can get, and there are differing tiers for different prices! Right now I'm just paying £1/month for 1GB of space, and since it's all done on Patreon, it's quite easy to then switch to the 2GB plan if I need it. They also include custom scripts for a chatbox and a guestbook, but the latter is a little finicky, so I may try to make something from the ground up for that... or just sign up for atabook or SmartGB.

Complete Visual Overhaul (Planned)

Right now, it's all a corkboard, and that's cool enough. But of course, as a hobbyist artist, my vision has expanded, and now I want my website to look like a full-on room. My idea for the index page is to have it be looking at a desk (using real-life pictures, no drawings), and the various trinkets and other assorted objects present on said desk are all links to other pages e.g. a notebook for About Me, a folder for My Projects, a little statue or figure for OCs... you get the gist. Everything's going to be made with real photos if possible, by either taking them myself or grabbing images online, and if I'm looking for something specific that isn't available online, I may either suck it up and learn Blender, or find a 3D artist to commission.

The Thought Garden (Or Whatever Else I Choose To Do With It)

I mentioned I may try to make a guestbook from the ground up before... well, this was my idea! Instead of the usual posts on a regular-looking page, it would instead be a patch of grass, with each post marked by a flower, which people could either hover over or click on! That said, I am also torn on whether I could make that more of a microblogging diary, where each flower can be hovered over, so that's still up in the air. I think ultimately the guestbook idea is far cooler, but probably more difficult to implement. Hopefully, it'll also be the only part of my website that requires Javascript to function, cause I know some people like to have it disabled for privacy reasons, so I'll probably just have a regular guestbook for them from one of the aforementioned sites, unless if I can figure out a way to keep my site static while avoiding JS use (which I doubt I can, but you never know).

Amushana Subdomain...? Maybe?

Considering I'll be writing a lot about Amushana... once I get round to actually developing the story and characters outside of the stuff I imagine in my head... I've been thinking of separating it from the rest of the site and having it as, you guessed it, on a subdomain e.g. amushana.dwinterwolf.com - don't bother trying that now, though, that'll just take you to the 404 page, haha! One of the main reasons why I'm thinking of doing this is because of just how much information will be on there and how many subpages it's going to probably have; I've already organised it into 4 subpages linked via a secondary navigation bar on my actual site, even if there's currently nothing there, that being the homepage, timeline of events, worldbuilding information, and a separate page for Amushana in its original form (which I like to call Beta Amushana). I'm struggling on deciding how exactly I want to structure things in the final website, especially with regards to the worldbuilding info... I imagine the magic system will have its own separate page from the general history of the world and country information (depends on just how many changes I want to make to countries' names and borders). There is a slight roadblock to amushana.dwinterwolf.com, however, that being that I'll probably have to either figure out a way to have the URL point to a specific folder on my site, or I'll have to find a separate host for it to link to, but we'll get there when we get there.

Pages I've Actually Made Progress On

I've been hesitant to do much work on my website, partly because of laziness, partly because of not wanting to constantly do everything on a screen, and partly because of screentime rules at home, but I have actually made substantial progress on a couple of my pages! The main ones are About Me and Artwork, although I have made a few changes to Links as well. About Me is now formatted in a much nicer way, as well as actually talking about me, rather than my fursona's lore, framed as a Q&A to split all the information at least a little more neatly! It's also a lot more legible than it was at the time of writing the OG Personal Website Blurb, now that it's encompassed within a .largeblurb, and while it is a little basic, I think it gets the point across well enough for now. Artwork now actually has my artwork on it, yippee (God bless whoever thought up loading="lazy", now the page doesn't take a full minute to load)!! Right now it's all the digital art I could find on my computer, I'm sure there's some still in my Wattpad art book I haven't included, and that's not to mention all the traditional sketches and drawings I've done that I either haven't uploaded or haven't even taken a picture of, that'll take a bit of a while to comb through, haha! I thought it'd be a lot harder than it was to pinpoint the dates of the images because of file transfers messing with the metadata, but shockingly I was able to find a "Date taken" property for the images that required it, which made my job of accurately dating and documenting those drawings a lot easier. Links has also been restructured, moving away from .postitul to .largeblurb, and it now includes links to my socials, cool websites I found, and a heck of a lot of song mashups for some reason... I'll definitely need to organise that more in the future, haha!

Anyways, I think that's probably enough for now, there's probably more I wanted to say but this should suffice. Now to brainstorm what to talk about next month...

~ December Winterwolf