A Year in Review
Wednesday February 14, 2024
It has been a year since my first blog post. I’d say it’s been a good year. My 10 year old self making a Kirby fansite on webs.com would be very happy.
Looking back
The layout hasn’t evolved much, but I don’t want to change things up just for the sake of change. At some point I created a light theme, but I don’t like it very much. I always use dark themes, so I don’t know if the light theme actually looks bad or if it’s just my preference for dark themes. The dark theme came first and I consider it the “default” look of this site. If you never knew there was another theme, switch your browser settings for a second and check the other one out.
I think the content of the website is just alright. Maybe I’m being too critical, but when I started this website I wanted it to be mostly informative. I was inspired by ShootTheCore’s website, which is why the first thing I really started posting about was my Versus City that needed to be fixed up. I didn’t want this site to turn into a diary, which is what every website I made before this turned into. I’d say I have done a decent job at keeping the blog posts varied and not weird, with the exception of my post about cutting out shitty habits. Maybe that one was weird, but I like that post. On the arcade side, it’s not as technical and informative as I wanted it to be. I can’t beat myself up about it too much because it’s all still new to me. My goal is to eventually post about my own repairs, not about how I shipped shit out for other people to repair. Speaking of, ShootTheCore is the one who repaired my CPS3. This post on his website is my CPS3.
By far my most popular blog post is “You Should Have a Website”. It was added to this list and it has been getting pretty steady visits ever since. I don’t know what happened, but on the 12th it got 69 visits. That’s the most daily visits I’ve ever had, and it was only on a single page. On average I get 4 or so visits to various pages each day. I don’t care about the numbers. It’s just nice to know that someone is reading the shit I’m spewing.
Looking forward
I have a few ideas for blog posts that require some research, so that’ll be a small step towards my original goal of this place being informative. Don’t expect a scientific paper or anything, but they’re more high effort than a bunch of Street Fighter tee shirts.
The gallery page is a bloated mess. A long time ago someone suggested using thumbnails instead of loading a billion full-sized images simultaneously, but I have no idea how to do that. Putting each year on a different page will, at least, keep the loading time from endlessly growing. Any image heavy page takes forever to load because I don’t compress any of the images taken on my phone. One of these days I’ll try to reduce the size of every image in bulk.
The reviews section is lacking. Despite what you and basically my entire extended familiy might think, I don’t play video games that much unless I’m with other people. I have a review for Tetris Kiwamemichi that’s practically finished, but I just need to add images. I’ll fire up Flycast one day.
I’ve been designing a new mascot to replace Cammy. It’s been taking me forever because I want to have it all ready to go before making a single change to the site. I’m also kind of hesitant to make the switch because I’m not very good at drawing. Slapping my DeviantArt tier drawings all over the place won’t look as good as the official Cammy art I steal from Capcom, but this is a personal website. It makes sense for everything here to be made by me.
I’m interested in your feedback. Let me know what you think about:
- The quality of content
- The new mascot idea
- Pretty much anything else
Thanks for reading this.