Envoy of the Ayatan

I'm still learning about this as I write but this is a neat little thing that got started called the Octothorpe Protocol

https://docs.octothorp.es/

I don't know if I can explain it adequately but I'll link to the 32bit cafe forum post that would do a better job of it.

https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/we-made-hashtags-you-can-use-on-regular-websites-i-hope-you-like-them/3361

I really like this a lot because it's a much more forward thinking approach to the 'idea' of webrings. One of the follies of modern webrings is that they don't attempt to utilize new technology beyond a GIT repository, and that only accounts for a small handful. (I find GIT interfaces incredibly obtuse, personally) It removes a lot of the micromanagement of typical webrings and affords a more flexible system that can adapt to how the website in question changes by permitting the web owner to add/remove context 'tags' as they update their site.

One of the downsides to WebRings was the need for someone to always be doing inventory on the ring. Making sure all the links were up to date and to remove bad URLS. This eliminates a lot of that, and IMO, makes it much easier to adapt to. It's only in version 0.5 so I'm really looking forward to seeing how this project grows. intrigued

I've not been around here much I've had my attention stretched really thin between work and a TTRPG and discord moderation (and gaming too much, I'll be honest) but I'm making myself sit down and write out this thought process out because it's important that I do. These little 'thinking out loud' posts about coding is always so helpful for me when I go back to troubleshoot or need to find specific references. On to the topic at hand though.

A while back I talked about how the internet can be ephemera and if anything is important to you, you should save it. So, I love Toyhouse, I love all its privacy features and ability to tag and interact with other people's characters on the service. However, I am also aware that the site is maintained by a single person, and though skilled, that's not exactly good for longevity.

If you're not in the know, Furaffinity's primary owner Dragoneer recently passed away and I have an ear to a lot of behind-the-scenes of the goings-on and the scramble that it is. There is a whole mess with something that big when the one holding most the keys is no longer around. CoHost is had to close this year, and countless amounts of Mastodon instances have come and gone, Pillowfort survives on a razor's edge, and I'm seeing the cusp of the end of life of all sorts of niche services. This fate could fall any independently owned platform, even this one (but at least with Dreamwidth I trust the owners to have contingency plans and trusted persons to take the mantle far better than FA has been handling it) and it's important to always have options so that you never feel like you loose what's really important if it goes. I've been slowly moving DeviantArt descriptions onto my own server in the event that it ever dies the only thing I'll be sad about loosing is the comments but my personal history will still be intact. That brings me back to Toyhouse and the knowledge that it, like many independently owned services could disappear at any time.

Now, I already have my Wiki, and I love the format and it's really helpful in a lot of ways, but it makes me dependent on an infrastructure I don't maintain myself. It also could be arguably bigger than what I actually need. In addition to that, it only includes information for all my world settings, and I also have some writeups for fan characters. Which is why I've been thinking of way to hand-make but also maybe mildly automate just a little bit, a dedicated self-hosted character repository system. I specifically want it to use some form of flat-file database so that when I want to add to it it doesn't feel like a whole.. event. I can also use my already existing gallery archive for all the images instead of uploading them over and over again like I have to do for my Wiki. There's just a lot of benefit to a more simple, straightforward system.

I of course.. have a lot of hurdles on this as only know enough PHP to modify existing code so I know this is going to be a lot of work. I made a post on the 32bit Cafe forum looking for other insight. I have friends I'm starting to pester because personable human conversation is so much easier for me to wrap my head around than. Like sure I can dig through this PHP Beginner's Handbook, but that still lacks personable insight. What I REALLY want is like, some stupid simple PHP code that utilizes a CSV file and not in a 'just post the array' sort of way. but (I don't know if there's a limitation to how CSV can be utilized, I don't know if I should be using XML or JSON as a database instead, but this is why I need people with knowledge to like actually talk to).

The end goal of all this, is not just to make a simple system for myself. But to also provide a system that anyone with limited knowledge can use. All they would have to do is follow a template to make their 'database' in any spreadsheet editor and save it as a CSV and then plug in all the necessary information into the code and that's it. If they want to add more characters or more tags they can do it in their spreadsheet editor and not have to mess with the code at all beyond the setup. This is more 'evergreen' and less daunting than manually coding each character page by hand or using a log-in interface to manage that can be prone to all sorts of additional vulnerabilities.

Hmm maybe the best place to start would be trying to find a tutorial on making a blog with PHP using a flat file database.

Stuff I'm looking at:
https://www.techbitbytes.com/data-exchange-formats-json-xml-csv/
https://www.nidup.io/blog/manipulate-csv-files-in-php
https://phppot.com/php/how-to-handle-csv-with-php-read-write-import-export-with-database/
https://github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms

(I am in no rush to get this figured out right now, I've got so many other things to do, first)

So going back to when I was talking about archiving. I pestered the people at 32 bit cafe and someone helped me with the script I needed!
This is the script I was given to adjust on the image.php file

<!--?php<br /--> $image= $_GET['image']; $textcontents = file_get_contents(preg_replace('/jpg|png|gif|jpeg|JPG|PNG|GIF|JPEG/', 'txt', $image)) ?> <img src="<?php echo $image;?>" alt="" /> <br><br> <!--?php echo $textcontents; ?-->

To see it in action: http://gallery.armaina.com/archive/2023/

I've only got that one year completed, thus far for proof of concept to document my work. I've got like two decades of descriptions to copy and paste into text files. But once it's all said and done, I'll never have to dig for descriptions that contained important context or just gave insight to everything that was going on with me at the time. This is really important for my sketches that I tend to have very little mirrors of whose descriptions get lost easily when a server dies. And no database means it's easy to move from host to host, and easier on my brain to manage.

Also researching metadata editing options has been very helpful in putting the correct creation date on old old files that had messed up creation dates. And this website https://www.amp-what.com/ has been super helpful to quickly find the HTML code for symbols used in descriptions.

Something I had been meaning to do, for ages, has been setting up a self-ran/hosted discord bot for my discord. I've been wanting to do this for something like... IDK 3-4 years, now. I had heard about redbot over a year ago, and it was always in the back of my mind to try setting up and I just never did for fear of not doing it right or otherwise failing.

Well, last night, on a whim when I couldn't write, I got the urge to install the bot. Since urges for actually opening up the SSH is rare, I followed through with it to take the motivation where I could get it. (text-only GUIs give me so much distress, it takes so much mental fortitude to get to work in them)

And shockingly, it was very easy. After getting over the obnoxious hump of a some PGP key not being correct and some out of date SSL when trying to update the libraries and things, I had no complications or issues with the actual installation and function of the bot itself. Not a single hiccup in the whole install process.

https://docs.discord.red/
This has to be some of the best documentation I've seen for a install guide. Very clear and easy to follow, specific syntax and everything provided, and guides to get all the other small details working on the server. The bot itself has clear and easy to understand menus for all its plugins and a lot of options for extra tools and features from the community.

So now, I have a discord bot to handle all those fancy things like self-assigned reaction roles. And I set it up! It's running on my own VPS!


That's her! that's my bot!

Speaking of walled garden experiences with certain tech fields, every time I see that infograph of 'Adobe Alternatives' being passed around I see that the 'Dreamweaver Alternatives' are like 90% text editors and it drives me nuts. Because, unless you're very well versed in script editing, no text editor will do what Dreamweaver does!!! And because I keep loosing track of what the options I'm documenting them all down, here.

The Best:
https://pinegrow.com/
This is, by far, the closest you'll get to a true alternative to Dreamweaver. But it is a paid for program and can be a little pricey at the start. It's been the only service I've found that offers both subscription and one time payments in a way that isn't awful. If you purchase a flat, one year license you get the product to keep with a year of updates. After that year, you still keep the product for as long as you like it doesn't lock you out of it. I purchased my copy back in October of 2020 and I still use that same version to this day. At any point, I can purchase another license for the year and get the most recent version.

Apart from all that, it has a great interface for both those that are code savvy and those that are not. I've used it a lot of times to give me ideas on certain CSS elements and styling that I can quickly see and edit through a visual editor. I admittedly go back and edit things by hand but even if I didn't, it picks up my personal files and edits them just fine. And also important, unlike all the other editors I'm about to list, it will function with php and other languages. I'd argue it's not 'just' an alternative to Dreamweaver, but better than Dreamweaver.

But after Pinegrow, there's a serious drop in accessibility and quality of similar services.

The Old Guard:
http://www.bluegriffon.com/
Blue Griffon is a long standing WYSIWYG editor that feels almost exactly like Netscape Composer. But because it's core focus is ebook formatting, it can be a bit awkward. The free version works well enough but I've noted some weird bugginess but it's serviceable enough for someone that doesn't need anything fancy.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
If you get the Sea Monkey suite, it comes with a WYSIWYG HTML editor that IS an updated Netscape Composer. You have to get the whole suite to get the composer which to some might be a deal breaker. But the composer is solid and it's still being updated to this day.

Shoutout to pre-adobe versions of Dreamweaver that still work on Win 10 that you can absolutely use with ease if you have a copy of them...

The CMS Disguised as an Application:
https://getpublii.com/
This functions a little more like a self-hosted CMS, (along the lines of Microsoft Publisher for the few that remember it) in that it functions solely on templates and then saves the whole project to a folder when you're done. You either need to get it to hook up to a host via FTP or 'publish' to a folder and then manually upload the files from there. Once again, very similar to how Publisher would post its websites.

https://www.silex.me/
This seems to function similarly to publii, but seems to have more features. At first it gave the impression that you could edit existing websites, but the import only works for things on Github and other similar services. There doesn't seem to be any way to open just regular HTML files on it so you're stuck using it's project system. Not great.

http://openelement.uk/
Another self hosted 'cms tool' website builder similar to the last two. You can drag and drop an HTML file into the editor but it doesn't display any of the CSS styles on the page so it defeats the purpose of being a WYSIWYG editor. Even Blue Griffon and Sea Monkey composer will at least display CSS colors and style elements.

Most other applications you can find that are WYSIWYG website builders aren't any better than Blue Griffon and Sea Monkey's Composer (and seem to be abandoned anyway). There just aren't a lot of options out there and it's genuinely frustrating. I love website crafting but I started with a WYSIWYG editor for years before I understood the code well enough to do it by hand. And even then, I still am glad nabbed pinegrow to troubleshoot, because having a WYSIWYG editor helps me with things I just can't process because I actually have a really difficult time with code.

WYSIWYG html editors need to be more prevalent and accessible to people that want to learn how to make a website, so that it's less daunting/intimidating. We can't keep shunting people to content managers like Wordpress or proprietary website builders like Wix/Squarespace because that forces them to become dependent on those specific tools. But at the same time we can't just drop them into a text editor and expect every person's brain to be able to just work with HTML and CSS with no training wheels. A lot of people I know would learn better like I did, having a WYSIWYG editor, making changes, and then being able to flip back to the code and looking at what changed and gradually incorporating those things into my knowledge base over time.

(though as a side note, best website text editor to date IMO is https://brackets.io/ because it's the ONLY one I've found that shows roll over previews for images and color.)

Tech is both wonderful and infuriating, accessible and insurmountable and it seems like there's no in-between and I say this as a person that is reasonably tech savvy and have been self-taught my whole life. And nothing highlights this issue more than trying to traverse something new.

SO there's a protocol called Gemini, if you're familiar with Gopher, it's like Gopher but a bit more. The internet as we know it, using browsers to browse information on URLS, uses HTTPS, Gemini is like that but simpler. You use a browser that accesses Gemini specific protocol content and put in URLs just like you would with any browser. In practice it's like browsing the internet, but there's a lot more to it than that, but that gives you the groundwork to understand what I'm about to complain about.

For my own silly little reasons, I want to run a gemini server. Problem is, most information on doing such a thing is either too sparse, or too much. So I asked a server if anyone had an absolute beginner's guide to running a Gemini server, and I was provided this:
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini

Without a doubt it's a fantastic list, but it doesn't provide me what I need: A Clear and Concise, step by step guide on everything an absolute newbie would need to do, to start and run a Gemini server. Sure I get my server installed now what? Do I need to do anything special to the DNS on my domain name? Do I need to make a Virtual Hosts entry specific to Gemini in Apache? If so what do I need to make, what do I need to point it to. What are the specific ports I need accessible on my server?

It took me an unnaturally long time just to find out the file name for the files I would use on Gemini, is .gmi. It's obnoxious how many layers I had to get through just to get to this.

And like this, this is all specific an thorough documentation on all the little details on how it functions, but none of it helps me get started.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html

And now I'm trying to install a server and these instructions are not complete.
https://opensource.glasgow.social/gemini-php

It doesn't provide me any information on how I'm supposed to define the domain, and all I can work with is the config file and some of that is similar to how virtual hosts are set up but it's not quite right. gemini://anexentum.com at least recognizes it as a gemini server but the certificate is bad and even if I trust it, it claims the files aren't there despite me pointing everything in the right direction in the config. (and the fact that it connects at all means I got the ports open correctly)

I'm setting it down for now because I'm hungry and text based GUI's really start to grind on me after a while and stress me out but uugggghhhhhh. There's no resources I know of that I can use for general practices and trouble shooting and other questions like 'am I supposed to throw php server.php into the command line every time I make a change to the config?' Like I don't know any of the basic protocol and best practices for this and there's no body of information that's set up in a way that makes sense to a person like me that isn't eyeballs deep in the command line daily.

A small but significant change was made to my archive section
http://gallery.armaina.com/
Before I just had the images display the file directory and that was it, it worked but it wasn't the cleanest way to do it. Now I have thumbnails for the images in a fairly painless way of doing it.

I did this by grabbing the Image Dumper script from here:
https://heckscaper.com/stuff/index.html
(and as a note, I only have PHP5 running on this server and the script works just fine)
all I had to do was drag and drop the index and image php scripts into the directory and that was it.

I'm only vaguely knowledgeable of PHP, but I managed to figure out just enough how to make the files display by date by using this as my reference:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124958/glob-sort-array-of-files-by-last-modified-datetime-stamp

I'll be making cosmetic changes to it eventually, but for now it works really nicely. Also it's through this I learned of a new way to do thumbnails, so I'll be working on my main site with a similar system so that I no longer have to manually make individual thumbnails. (I objectively knew something like this would work I just wasn't sure how to go about doing it until I saw this in action. In this case it's a div with a background image set to Cover, and placement Top.)

Not having individual thumbnails might make things load a little slower but it will make it so much easier for me to update in the long run, it means faster updates and that's a good thing. Also makes it easier/faster for me to add all manner of thumbnails elsewhere and swap out things. Not only that, having thumbnails for all my work in my archives will make it so much faster for me to find things. I need to get back to work on mirroring my sketch archive there because right now it's only half-complete as I had been using LJ for my sketch repository for a large chunk because I didn't want my finished works mixed up with my sketches side by side.

Thank goodness for people that share their simple scripts for others to use freely ;_;

In the process of working on a hub site for my comics, so I should probably also talk a little about the name 'announcement' too. A bounce off the title babble I did a few months ago, I decided to make a word that would signify my very specific setting/universe. After some word fussing, research, and looking to a translation reddit for help, I smashed some things together and edited it a bit to get a word:
Anexentum

I let it sink in for a few weeks, I did this with a few different words before it, and this time it really stuck in my head and so there it is. That means I went and got myself a domain for it, to make it 'official'. And now I have a website that will serve as a hub for all of my comic projects that are in that setting.

http://anexentum.com/

It solves two problems. Instead of trying to secure a unique domain for every comic I can just make a subdomain to the existing site, making it both easier and cheaper for me in the long run. Also, because I have all my comics under a 'hub', if I decide to make any one-shots, side stories, or other little extras, I can also just make a sort of 'extras' subdomain and put everything under that rather than trying to figure out where exactly to put it in the other 3 comic sites.

I've been working slowly on trying to learn how to add more 'polish' to my designs/layouts. That was something that I always had difficulty with, adding that little extra that makes something look a little nicer, a little more style and competence. One of those things was trying to figure out how to make text look better in just CSS, and in looking up ideas I found this fantastic tool:

https://cssgradient.io/

It saves the pain of figuring out HOW to make things work, and it's one more thing that makes fancy CSS techniques more accessible to me. You can see I used it a few times in the new layout.

Also I'm trying to expand my use of CSS a little more. While I technically could take giant fancy blocks of code off codepen and plug them in, I don't like doing that because I want to really understand what I'm working with so I prefer to stay within the realm of code that I can actually parse with my own brain and could mostly re-write or at least know what I'm looking for if I had to. This means I approach advanced techniques very slowly, because I want to know exactly what it is I put in my CSS, so that if I ever go back to it I can understand what I'm looking at and what I'm looking for.

This approach, on top of the fact that I'm using Grids, has made me advance further with CSS in the last few months than I ever have in my entire life. Apart from just generally hating how flexbox formatting worked pre-grids, and being completely lost on how the arrangement works, I just also didn't get a lot of OTHER things about CSS, and I know this was because I couldn't just slowly take my time with it. The old system required me to know how to make it work Right Then because I couldn't even get a basic scaffolding to work, so I couldn't slow down and spend my time tweaking all the small bits and pieces bit by bit because I couldn't even get the framework, and thus, a foundation, to work in the first place.

So it's just nice that I can slowly learn all these things, problem solve here and there, and have it work.

That aside, it's nice to have something up on the domain to show what's going on, to set things in motion. Now if I could just figure out why it is I can't get ComicControl to install on my server, if there's some module I need, some setting I'm missing or something that needs to be fixed on the server. I'm still not finished with the first arc of the script so it's not an urgent rush.

Me, idly one morning: 'I really need to figure out how to make an XML Site Map'
30 min later: Cool I have a sitemap now :O

After way too long I finally got around to throwing down something on the projects page that had been an empty link for ages.
http://armaina.com/projects.html
So now I have something in writing for real on my website that shows any stranger wandering onto my site that I'm doing more than just pretty drawings and there's a purpose and pointing people into directions based on my synopsis.

Also going to figure out how to make pages display specific custom details when in their link preview on things like Discord or Twitter. And I still need to make my favicons. I may not like the current state of web 3.0 social media nonsense, but I have to adapt to it, either way. Also going to try to brush up a bit on my CSS beautifying, I want to make it look just a little bit more 'sleek', something a bit less amateurish, if I can. I have my function down, it's easy to navigate, it works, and now that all my pages are in, it's time to see if I can get it a little fancy and learn something new.

I've been doing kinda NaNoWriMo this month. It's more so that I've made a promise to myself to open up my growing list of WIPs and text files and work on them to some degree. The point is less to write one thing or hit 50K, but just to make myself set aside the time to write more in general. It's a habit I need to do more often in general, just like I would with art, so that I can get my scripts rolling at a steady pace. Glad to say it's been going well and I'm at least writing something. And the sooner I have a lot of somethings, the sooner I have a finished product.

Apart from that, been busy with all the above and work. Work is still going great, and all my co-workers are just fantastic!

And now, have a stack of links to things I found interesting or cool.

This post about The Brave Little Toaster and a theme of Faith, but not strictly faith in the religious sense.
https://walonvaus.dreamwidth.org/139434.html

A video of a test-concept of full-on artificial muscle structures on a robotic arm. While non-viable for real prosthetic work in this day and age, it's really cool to see functioning mechanisms like this for personal reference in super future robotics concept/design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guDIwspRGJ8

Been hearing about Crypto and NFTs and have no idea what's up? Want a remarkably thorough breakdown about that everything means? Here you go.
https://antsstyle.medium.com/why-nfts-are-bad-the-long-version-2c16dae145e2

We still have no idea how Eels reproduce and that's wild
https://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex/eels-dont-have-sex-until-the-last-year-of-their-life

Speaking of Oddities, I've really enjoyed the chill vibes of this old tech Videographer for a long time now, and I think more should too. He's got this fun Oddware series where he reviews Odd and Unique old hardware. I recommend pretty much everything he does but his Oddware is a nice place to start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBtETkJeqmY&list=PLB9FA1979AB986522

I thought? I had talked about this moderately recently but I guess not? But I've been working on my website, mostly on the CSS front.

http://armaina.com/

The overall look is still the same but I've been doing little things here and there to try to beautify the website a little, little things like adding little extra style and also adding in some nice and fancy custom fonts to the site. Honestly the custom fonts do SO much to the overall feel of the site despite being such a simple addition and I'm glad I added them.

The other massive breakthrough was discovering the CSS Grid syntax (max-device-width). Which meant I could designate specific things for my website elements to do at the width of the device, as opposed to the PX size which is so different now due to the DPI size of phone and tablet screens now. This means everything re-arranges in more optimal positions for the appropriate size of the device for much easier navigation/viewing.

In relation to that, spottyjaguar helped me figure out a more tricky arrangement with element bound inside one of the grid elements so that they are side-by-side in the wide view but below each other in a narrow view. If you are on the about page or the colleagues page if you shrink or expand the window you can see how the elements shift depending on the width of the screen.

All in all this is the happiest I've ever been with a website layout of my own in a long time. It's not the most fancy but it certainly feels the most competent. Now I just have to make myself a title image that looks a little more Cohesive with what I got there lol. Also maybe figure out something better for what I have written on the home page. But it's nice to have a website that I feel more confident in showing to people.

Time for more Adventures in Running a Server!!

So I've been trying to install Icecast2 onto the server (after the rates for my streaming service in second life went up I had been considering running it on my own) and after much trial and tribulation, I finally got it to work!
http://radio.armaina.com:8000/
(there's no stream RN, it only plays when I connect to it and stream directly, don't have the bandwidth for a constant stream)

So that's the end goal. But how I got to that point is a tale in my continued frustration with lacking documentation for things with a high barrier of entry that constantly assume you already know everything.
( Read more... )
And now I move on to the next big step and possible headache in running a server takes a deep breath
Encryption.

Speaking of learning how to wrap my brain around things and trying to figure out how to make things work for me, I think I found what it is really what makes it so difficult for me to work with any sort of terminal setup. I need to be able to make a mental connection between the text lines on the terminal and what's actually happening in the files of the server itself, visually.

Each command line is fleeting, ephemera, it's gone after you close the window, sometimes after it's scrolled too far. You can't see what you did last, you can't cross-reference easily, and it's easy to get lost. I get the same panic feeling working in a terminal setting as I do when I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem with a person without being able to see anything. I have to be able to open up the same program and look at the same menus while I walk someone one through it, otherwise, there's nothing to ground me. If I have no references I lose my place all the time, I feel constantly frantic and floaty like grasping at something intangible. Also, my brain just doesn't like it when I can't see everything all at once when I'm troubleshooting, even when organizing stuff physically it can only really do it when I have as much in front of me as possible.

Things clicked for me when I was trying to look up virtual host stuff to try to figure out how to set up another domain. In attempting to see if there was anything I could do to make it work using SCP, I had to figure out where the files for such settings were actually housed. Being able to see where this stuff was, immediately lifted off a significant amount of freezing and intimidation I get with command-line terminal actions. I could finally connect a command-line action, to a specific change the files and exactly where it took place. It was no longer this nebulous thing that just Happens For Some Reason, I knew where to look for the files and had a way to see that they existed at all and what they were named. Now if only I could find tutorials that had side by side comparisons between what you typed into the terminal, and what is going on visually in the files. x_x

At the very least I need to figure out if somehow, somewhere, there's actually a listing for all the default locations new app installs go to. If I at least knew where to look I could try figuring it out from there. I'd still like side-by-side terminal vs visual file system comparisons/guides, but I doubt that'll ever happen. Now to figure out how one backs up and re-deploys a server in case my attempts to work with it ever blow up x_x