Page Rehauls, New Poll Widget, and General Housekeeping
Released: NOVEMBER 28, 2024
It has been a while since my last update. Previously, I was able to submit an update every week. Now that I'm making larger changes, updates will be less frequent. I think maybe once a month is a good tempo to work on the site. This is supposed to be fun though, so if I don't update in a month, that's totally okay! Here are a few tweaks I made since October, it's quite a bit so this may be lengthy.
New and Rehauled Pages
CH-ROM has received yet another rehaul. At first, I struggled with knowing what I wanted from an art gallery. I have been so used to using whatever is given on a website like deviantART or Instagram that I realized that I would have to design my own to function AND look nice. I think this will be the last time I do something to the gallery, I have other projects/pages to make and I don't want to burn myself out on the art gallery every week. The art gallery is also somewhat more responsive than it was before, I'm still working on that but I feel like it's a large improvement from the previous version, where the gallery was nested in an iframe. I may go back just to mess around with the CSS, but I shouldn't need to go back and change any HTML (it's static and therefore a LOT of work to revise.)
As you can see, the OBSERVATORY is finally built and open to the public. Here is where you'll see full reports on what has been added/changed, it's just a little blog for me to ramble about I worked on and how things are going. I rarely use the social media aspect of Neocities, so this is like a way for me to keep anyone who's following this site up to date. It's looking bland right now, but I promise I'll put some more flair to it and make it more in theme with the rest of the site. Expecting the Laboratory/WIP blog to look similar, could never go wrong with sidebars! Site map, and guestbook is live! I used to have Atabook for my guestbook, but I decided to have something with more customization options. You might also see that each page has some kind of "flavor text" that kinda correlate with the Kaleido Conservatory. Eventually, I'll get into writing lore and uploading it here, but I thought it would be fun to immerse visitors into the world I am trying to build on the site.
Polls
Introducing polls in the right sidebar, these will mostly be for my plush stuff. I have tons of ideas for things to make and what better way to narrow it down than to ask the community? As of this entry, there is a poll asking what other balloon animal should be made into a plush. I originally started plush making by making these balloon dog plushies, and I thought that maybe making more animals would be fun! There's quite a few, so the 1st and 2nd highest animal may see themselves turned into a plush!
There will be more polls of course, I'll be writing entries for when they change. I figure maybe 1 poll every month or two depending on how fast I can work on projects.
Cosmetic Changes
When I decided on the name CHROMAELEON, I tried to lean towards machines and space. At first, it was just nothing but blue (my favorite color) and it gave the site a sci-fi vibe, which is great! However, I want to try adding more colors to the palette without it being annoying and hard to read. Adding small accents like rainbow horizontal lines, and red text definitely made a difference. I'll continue to work on this, so these things may change. I'm also trying to piece together the site's identity, so it's being made up as I go. I've been keeping screenshots of the site since it was being built, so hopefully I'll see how they compare as I go on. Page title/header text used to be styled using webkit text stroke, but I realized that it looked odd on certain browsers and to make it more compatible, I swapped to text shadow instead. Not only does it work nicely with most browsers, it looks cooler! As I learn new techniques, I feel as though the site begins to look better.
Plans
To conclude this entry, I wanted to say I thought about redoing the index page (AGAIN) and getting rid of the iframe the site is heavily dependent on. When I first started, I used iframes heavily because I didn't have any idea how to build a site without them. I like having the sidebars on every page, but I want to learn how to do this without relying on iframes. This is something I'll work towards once I get more pages done and when site construction feels more "stable". Right now it feels like I'm not focused on one thing and I'm trying to change a little bit of everything all at once.
Next update should be the Lab, once I have my WIP blog page done, I'll go back to sewing so that I can have more things to upload on this site. Ever since I got into coding and designing my own site, I've slowly been getting back into the groove in creating. Hoping to have some more cool things to share with you all next month!