Blau's Blog

So what's Blau doing? 10/22

Date: [22nd Oct 2024]
Categories: [Blau Chatter], [Kinzart Kreetures]

I have a bad habit (sort of? more of a brain thing) where I completely forget what I've done over the past week or so. It all just kinda blends together. But! I have been up to stuff, and figured I'd round everything up into one post.

Kinzart Website, Round 3

I'm working on it! Again! Initially I had written a lot of the site in Jekyll, but I didn't want to put Umbra through learning how to use Jekyll (and Git) just to add a blog post. So I moved it to Wordpress. And then Wordpress started doing some totally, completely normal, not at all suspicious shit. So I wanted to move off of that, distance myself from it as much as I can.

I tried out Grav - it's not bad but it's a little too computer toucher for this use case. (You can't add images to blog posts until you save a draft first. That bothers me a lot. I know there's a reason. It still bothers me.)

Remembered, finally, oh yeah, Publii is a thing. So I downloaded it and... got extremely distracted in Warframe and VRChat for a while. And mildly sick for a bit. But finally got around to running it yesterday and it's pretty dang close to what I'm after.

Currently working through the posts imported from the Wordpress version of the site - the text imported fine, but images weren't included, and I needed to fix authors on most of them - then I need to work on manually importing the avatar pages. Got the FAQ rearranged to accomodate a Secret Project¹, got a section set up for lore, need to get a section set up for downloads and whatnot.

Last thing is going to be customizing the theme so it's a little more homey. I had tinkered with some other Publii themes, but none of them felt... great. Some were missing some features I really want the site to have. The default theme is fine though. Someday when I'm more familiar in the languages Publii uses I wanna write a custom theme, but for now, I just want this website done, this is the third round of starting over, I'm tired lol.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind using Publii for this site, but I like having a little thing that I wrote. Not to mention dealing with themes. I would like a GUI to write into though, rather than just directly into VSCode. A project for the future I think. Only big gripe with Publii is that to preview your current edits you have to hit Preview and wait for it to re-build the whole site; on Jekyll you can just bundle exec jekyll serve and it'll automatically rebuild as you save files. It's ultimately a minor gripe, overall it's quite good.

VRChat and a Fursona Redesign

I've been wandering around in VRChat a bunch lately. Almost entirely just going to game worlds or exploring in solo instances. I don't have a headset, so I'm in Desktop mode, but it's still nice. I'm getting a bunch of ideas for small little prefabs / accessories, and I'd like to work on learning Udon so I can make (or help make) worlds at some point. Got some neat little ideas for those.

I'm getting pretty attached to the avatar I've been wearing - the public demo for Takoma's Ashera Dragoncat. I'm saving up to pick up the full version at some point.

Blau's redesign is progressing fairly well. Honestly, I envy people who made a fursona 10-15 years ago and have stuck with it the whole time. Blau's gone through so many iterations I've lost count. I really need to work on Blau's Longass Species Post Round 2 at some point, once I pull my brain out of website gear.

Anyway: Last year, about the time I swapped Blau over to being a dragon, I was trying to get a dragon-cat to work in SL. For the life of me I could not get it to work in a way that sat well with my brain, so I just kinda went, fuck it, full dragon time, she'll just act like a cat instead of being a cat. Like most of her prior forms, though, that stuck for a while, and then I started not feeling very comfortable with it anymore. Something just felt... wrong somehow.

I finally managed to make it sorta-kinda work in SL, like I mentioned in my last Blau Chatter post. I was then recommended the Dragoncat in VRChat and my brain clicked something fierce. Even though I can't customize the demo version very much, I've been stuck to it, using it as my default, unless I need a smaller avatar for something (I know I can resize myself, but sometimes you just wanna be a slugcat).

I've got a design for her in my head, but there are a bunch of details that I have to wait to work on until I can pick up the full avatar up there and tinker with it in Substance. It's just how my brain works best with coming up with designs - throwing something together in SL, or with free lineart, or now with VRChat.

But, broadly, she's a dragoncat, going to be pulling a lot of broad design cues from GW2 Charr (I am normal about Charr I swear) - more big-cat than small-cat. Honestly, she's ending up very close to her Thel² iteration, and I'm considering her being a Thel morph of some sort, but I need to think that through some more. She's probably going to be staying tuxedo patterned, largely, but I might make adjustments to her face, arms, and legs. I may give her spots, but I'm unsure yet. Her tail shape may change from dragon-with-a-fluff to more "normal" feline.

Mastodon

I scooted instances on Mastodon again. I didn't really want to given Cohost just closed up and all of my posts on there point to my old instance, but, hey, can't do anything about that.

You can find me on Critter Cafe now: https://critter.cafe/@blaurascon

Critter Cafe also has the version of Mastodon that enables author credits, so that's cool!

Migrating Cohost Posts

I migrated over a couple of posts from my public Cohost, specifically dealing with Skyrim. Those mod lists were super helpful to me the last times I was playing as references to mods, especially when my Skyrim install exploded and I needed to completely dump everything and start over. I'm slowly putting together a new save and updating my mods, so I'll likely make another one of those mod lists when I do (and make sure everything works, lol).

Infoboxes

I got infoboxes working! I've wanted to get these working since I started this refresh, since a few of the Jekyll themes I was browsing had something similar (based on something Github Pages lets you do, I think). Doing this was also my first time using mixins, and they're really neat!

This infobox indicates a Tip, a useful bit of knowledge that deserves to be highlighted. {: .infobox-tip }

This infobox indicates some important extra Info. {: .infobox-info }

This infobox indicates Caution. It's also used for Content Warnings at the top of blog posts and on the index page, when they're used. {: .infobox-caution }

This infobox is a Warning of something dangerous. {: .infobox-warning }

The colors need some adjustment, but I think they get the point across.

Getting these working also involved getting Font Awesome installed, which was much more of a saga than it really should have been, mostly because of the way my files are arranged, but I did the usual computer trick of moving a thing, testing, moving it back, testing again, and suddenly it's working. Who knows. I'm not gonna touch it again. But now I have neat icons to play with!

Miscellaneous Blog Stuff

I'm honestly thinking about just getting rid of Tags because they do functionally the same thing as Categories with how I have this blog set up. The only difference between the two in Jekyll is that Categories can be part of the post's URL and tags can't, but I have Categories excluded from being in the URL, so like... they're functionally the same lol. I should get the date archives up if I do that, but I need to make an easy way to get to them and I'm not sure how I want to do that quite yet.

I popped the code that generates the index pages (for main blog page, category, and tag archive pages) into an include for my own sanity. It's also why the Pinned text is on top of the pinned post instead of next to it. This bothers me. I need to fix it. I have an idea how I want to fix it but I'm not sure if it'll work or not.

On my to-do list is adding comments support, search support, and some more links to the links page as well as some non-link buttons and whatnot. Also a light mode and a way to toggle it. Don't think I'll be able to make it remember choices without using a cookie or something though, unless there's some trickery I'm not aware of.

I made myself a little personal Trello to keep track of my ideas and projects rather than the notepad on my desk because I keep putting my phone on top of my notes and that's not very helpful.

And... I think that's it? I think? For now! I don't have a clever outro so uh. bye for now