The fact is I don’t use this blog nearly enough. I’ve got this weird blocker in my mind that I should only put “important” stuff here, so I don’t write anything I’ve been interested in lately or talk about recent life experiences or anything like that. That’s pretty sad for a blog, especially since the first blog entry here is just me rambling about The Blue Channel. I’d like to start writing things here more often, so I’ll try to begin being more mindful of it. I already have a fair handful of topics backed up that would be very worth writing blog entries about, which is part of why I’m working on this one again.

I might consider just sitting down once a week and seeing if anything comes to me, and writing down anything that happened or that I just plain started thinking about during the week that I’d like to turn into a post. I don’t know, I’m still thinking about it.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is comments. Adding comments to a static blog is pretty difficult, and I don’t even know how much value a comments section holds for me. So the compromise I’m thinking about is if you want to say something about a blog post I’ve made, you can contact me at blog@donnovanhudson.com with your thoughts, and if it’s not some wild nonsense and you say you’d like it to be a comment I’ll simply begin appending any mail I get that way to the bottom of the blog post.

If you don’t care much about me talking about all the stuff I did to this website this year, you can go ahead and move on to reading something else at this point. Maybe you could read Sandcastles on the Beach, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fanfiction I started writing a couple months ago for reasons still unknown to me. Or don’t, it’s your choice.

Website Improvements

I had intended to finish and post this way back in March or so, when I was making this last round of changes, but I never did. Looking through my drafts again after being sent a strong reminder by the world that I should make use of this blog more often, I saw this and felt that there was no reason not to finally finish it and ship it off.

It only took a solid year to get back to this website and finally finishing out all the basic content I wanted in it. That’s the wonderful thing about being very “out of sight, out of mind” is that you begin piling up unfinished tasks because you simply forgot to do them. A friend of mine lovingly yelled at me about actually finishing up the at-the-time non-existent pages I had been procrastinating on for so long, and I got distracted along the way and ended up doing a bunch of other extra stuff as well.

New Fonts

The main font of the website has been switched to IBM Plex under the included license. The majority of the website is IBM Plex Sans.

The font you’re seeing right now, at least at the time of writing, is one I drew by-hand on my Supernote A6X (in my opinion, when I actually make use of my Supernote, it was one of the best purchases I ever made) and then vectorized using the free version of Calligraphr.

Getting the font working was actually extremely difficult, and a lot of it was the software I was using being tricky. Calligraphr itself has some limitations, especially in the free version, so I ended up creating two different fonts and then merging them together later. If I did this again, and I might, I suspect it would be easier to vectorize my handwriting by hand using a program like Inkscape instead.

Once I had something in the shape of a font, I ended up merging, fine-tuning, and kerning everything using FontForge. FontForge is an excellent piece of software that has its flaws, and at least on my computer I found it crashing a lot and seemingly corrupting my font once, but it works very well. Would recommend. I originally tried doing my font editing in BirdFont, but while it’s a very intuitive piece of software BirdFont has its own issues, some of which simply come from being software that was at one point open-source and then ceased being so.

There are a lot of glyphs that simply don’t exist in this font as yet (such as diacritics), and I don’t know if or when I’ll take the time to make them work. There also isn’t a monospace version, so I’ve set the <code> tag to fall back to IBM Plex Mono.

The final font is named Arcanist’s Daughter after my favorite handwriting font, Architect’s Daughter. I would most likely be using Architect’s Daughter instead if the concept wasn’t to use my own real handwriting. While nothing is stopping you from just downloading Arcanist’s Daughter from this website and using it yourself, please don’t. I’m considering it all rights reserved, and frankly it’s not worth using in the majority of contexts to begin with. I don’t care if you slap it on your text editor for personal use or something like that, but unless something changes and I happen to place a license on it later please don’t make public use of it yourself.

Was creating this font even worth it? I don’t know. I can read it fine, but that’s because it’s my own handwriting.

Notebook Styling

I’ve come to really love dotted grids since picking up my Supernote. They have all the usefulness of a traditional grid, but much less visually intrusice. Get a ruler and you can line them any way you want. I do most of my writing on my Supernote on either 6mm ruled lines or on a dotted grid, depending on whether I’m writing print to read again later like a journal or creating a todo list. So, obviously, using a font based on my own handwriting demands a style that makes it look like it’s on dotted grid paper.

Everything in the style is on a hard grid based on the size of the text. Elements in a notebook div are sized and spaced to always respect the grid so I can use titles, horizontal rules, images, and everything stays perfectly alligned. The effect was pretty time-consuming, especially getting it to work with images, but I think it came out pretty well.

The paper stack effect is a pretty simple one, originally taken from a codepen example, but I’ve tweaked it quite a bit. The problem with these effects which depend on rotation is that the larger your divider is, the more pronounced the effects of rotation are. So I’ve changed it to be a very subtle rotation effect which scales down based on the screen width, combined with a bit of linear translation so that it still looks good even when the rotation is completely disabled. In addition the effect clips to the size of a surrounding div, meaning it can’t get out of hand and mess with the page’s width or start covering up the background.

The Background

This is an actual picture of my desk which I took ages ago and then blurred and crunched down. It could look a lot better, but it could also look a lot worse. I dug up the original picture and redid it somewhat, and I think the effect works. The final version was aggressively compressed using TinyPNG and then converted to a .webp using PortalRunner’s ‘Convert to it!’, which I should arguably be doing with every image on this website. Pictured in the background are a handful of colorful index cards, some of my favorite dice at the time, my Wacom stylus and favorite mechanical pencil, my Playdate, and far in the background a reproduction 1830’s print Book of Mormon. In reality my desk is never actually that clean.

The white bit is just a div with plenty of padding which is filled with a mostly-opque off-white and given a slight blur. I like it. It’s a little bit like theming a Tumblr blog, funnily enough.

The Microblog

Is it sad at all that I’ve been making somewhat regular use of the microblog section since it was added in late Feburary while this main blog has been languising in disuse?

I’m not the biggest fan of posting random thoughts to social media. Something about it just doesn’t really work for me. I don’t like posting random things on the microblog here as much as most people seem to either, but it’s better. I think the biggest problem I have with typical social media is that it’s all about interaction, and I don’t like posting things I don’t want people commenting on there. I don’t really use any of my accounts anywhere else often for that exact reason; I’m not huge on random people coming up and telling me that I hate waffles, so I only post to them when I have something meaningful I want to actively show off.

This microblog is based on twtxt and works through a very simple Lua script I put together, it’s and designed to be updated from any Linux environment where it can run. That means I can post to it from termux, for example. The canonical source of information is posts.txt, and template.txt is the source for the HTML template. The script fetches them from the live website using curl, appends to posts.txt, generates a new HTML page and rss feed, and pushes them back to the website with the Neocities cli. It works pretty well. It’s probably possible to make a script that does the same thing in Bash, but I’m just more confortable with Lua.

Overall Thoughts

Working with CSS is rewarding, but it’s also really painful. Working with my own code is similarly challenging. But if we don’t push through challenges, how are we ever supposed to make anything worth looking at? I’m grateful for my time writing and modifying custom themes when using Tumblr, because while I didn’t really understand what I was doing at the time the knowledge I’ve gathered is very useful. Like it says in the changelog page, I have to thank to my friend Eir for helping me figure out some very tricky CSS interactions. Check her website out, it’s pretty cool.

To-Do

I still have a few things of minor importance I’d like to do before I call anything “finished.” The main thing is I want to edit my preprocessor to allow for creating multiple pages from one single input page, which would help a lot with pagination and RSS generation. I’d also like to do something about tagging pages, although that’s a very low priority, and give myself a priority system so that, for example, the RSS generator can include the complete text of one of these pages and not just the short description.

I also very much need to change it so I can change the “magic character” my preprocessor uses, since having to put an escape character before all of my headings in the markdown is a little annoying. Having actual YAML might also be nice.

But at the end of the day, everything works fine for now. There’s no shame in something just “working.”