Man, I managed to get quite a bit done today on the site. Needed to do a bit of cleanup in the "news" section with some of it becoming "olds". Realized I needed to add a new page to Poe for her "This Road" release, so I did that. Moved Brad's covers from "news" to his page as an official subpage, and gave his special "Loss Leader" release a subpage too. And I finished the "oddly oppositional" post and added it to misc. Good times!

After I got the alternate colors working on the main site, I was a little iffy on whether or not I liked it, but it's growing on me. I think getting the colors "right" makes a big difference. I've reworked Noctica's colors a few times now. I think I've finally gotten it, but I need to live with it for a bit to see.

Also thinking about rewriting the notes on the Catherine Winters page. I wanted to do something different than what you normally see, a bit more informative about her and her work, but what I ended up with feels "off" somehow. It has five-paragraph-essay energy, and that's never good. If I leaned into the five-paragraph essay more, and made it "a thing", it might work, but right now it just feels lame. Also, I should make the old animated banner add link to her to give the full experience.

So I setup Catherine Winters and Noctica with custom colors to see how I like the idea. Also playing around with the different colors to see what looks good. Stil need to apply the custom colors to Noctica's subpages to get the full experience there though.

Finally got the new CSS to work. Restarting the test and applying the new CSS one piece at a time worked without making everything go wonky. I must have been mucking something up, I'm just not sure what. I was also able to do away with the simple invert for dark mode, which considering the number of special overrides I needed to include wasn't that simple. Now I can specify the dark mode colors to use and it's all much nicer.

Now I'm thinking about applying different colors to each artist's section to break up the monotony. However, I need to think about how I want to handle the external link icon that shows at the end of links going off site. It is an image file, so I'll need multiple ones for the different colors. Mostly I need to decide how I want to organize them. I keep debating on putting a bunch of resources into a special resource folder or keeping them with their respective parent content. I'll probably go with putting the resource with the parent content as I'm already doing that, and I think for the way I work, it has an efficiency edge. Also, debating file naming. As the files will be in separate folders, I can have it named the same in every folder, which has some ease of use to it. However, then I run into the issue of not being able to identify the color without looking at the file contents.

Tried to update the CSS yesterday and again it did very weird things. Despite going over the whole CSS I couldn't find the reasons why it goes all wonky. I was trying to do it "all at once" as I figured that would be the easiest, but I guess I'll either have to try doing each thing separately, or maybe even take it off-line. Just had a thought: maybe I need to restart the test page from scratch, don't do any experiments, just work out the current set of things I want to make happen. That way, maybe I can get to a copy/paste situation. Yeah, think I'll try that next.

I keep playing around in my test area with different things I think I might want to do on my site. It can be a never-ending cycle of options, so I thought I would try adding the 5-color setup to the main site, to get a little "forward movement" going. First, it was not as easy as I thought it would be. I did too much extra stuff in test to make it a copy/paste situation. Second, it didn't look as good in production as it did in test. Because I was only changing the colors and nothing else, it just didn't have the same feel. I would have just set the colors back to three, but some things beyond the colors got messed up when I updated the CSS, so I just backed it out until I have more time to review and correct.

Obviously the layout and formatting of a site is important, but I also feel like maybe I'm not spending enough time on the content. Unfortunately for me, writing can be difficult. I have found this site to be easier than say, work emails, because I can come back anytime and edit. I have been publishing and then reworking things again and again. Sometimes it will be big, but I may just tweak a word or phrase here and there. It's also easier with smaller pieces, but the bigger a section is, the more difficult it is to write up. Even these little logs can take a bit for me. Started this yesterday, but didn't get it finished.

Been mostly concentrating on site formatting recently. First I want to take my 3 color setup and expand it to 5 colors. I want to be able to use 3 or 5 colors. I have a pretty basic color setup with a light, medium, and dark color, and I want to have the option of adding an additional light and dark color to spice things up. Since I use variables in my CSS I only need to update the variable and all the elements that use that color update. It is very convenient, but I also had to verify that elements that used the additional 2 colors looked good when collapsed into the base light and dark colors. Still working on it so it hasn't made it to the main site, but my testing page had to get a few changes to accommodate. And I'm also making sure they work with the other changes I'm currently thinking about. Right now, I'm using a simple filter invert for "dark mode", which with my current colors and setup works fine, but I think I may need to investigate how I can specify the colors to use or not invert specific parts. The parts of the site that become bright in dark mode are small, but some of the changes I'm looking at may add enough bright areas to make simple inversion not a good option.

I'm looking into adding pics or icons as the links to the artist pages instead of regular text links. I'm thinking about narrowing and centering the body of the page because pages never seem to look that great on really wide screens unless you have a lot of content. And even then, it's usually broken up into different sections, not one big column like I currently have. Another thing I'm debating is a navigation menu. It's kind of funny, because I kind of like the basic "back" link kind of setup. I think it adds something to the exploration of a site. On the other hand, I navigate my site more than anyone and having the menu would be handy for me. Need to think about it and maybe explore a few other sites while I pay attention to their navigation options.

Also discovered that if I embed a Threads post and an Instagram post on the same page only the first one renders. Meta is so fucking useless.