Site Updates!!! Yay!!!!!

School's starting up again, but in that time I've made some noticable changes to my website, and I've officially begun work on a major project regarding it. I'm really happy with how it looks right now! More info under the cut.

The most obvious change is the sidebar. Previously, I borrowed stole (minor aesthetic changes notwithstanding) a very cute-looking sidebar from Windchime, the personal site of a very kind fellow named Hajime! I thought it wouldn't be a faux pas since he was known for making and distributing layouts for Tumblr and Neocities, and assumed he was open to this kind of usage (so long as it was with proper attribution and wasn't taking the whole site with Hajime's personal touches intact. Looking at you, Maru/Dice/Hiskaru). I learned quite a bit from tinkering with it, even if the changes were minor.

But anyway, it turned out that wasn't the case, as one person in the Cbox and Hajime himself over on Tumblr pointed out. He requested I change the sidebar at my earliest convenience, so I did! I'm really happy with how my new sidebar looks, it really suits the aesthetic of my site. It's got dropdowns and it even has mobile responsiveness (if your screen width is on the smaller side, you'll get a similarly-functioning navigation bar on top instead of a sidebar). I couldn't do that with a skin-grafted sidebar!

Honestly, I wish I made my own from the beginning. Oh well! No harm, no foul. Hajime himself is obviously very skilled and he was very polite when speaking in private even though it would've been totally fair to go off (I wasn't the first to swipe from his personal site, but I hope I'll be the last), so I implore you to follow him on Tumblr if you haven't already.

As for smaller changes, I added some more buttons to my marquees and I moved the Webamp player to the very top right of the screen. There are four marquees dedicated to buttons - I'm thinking of merging them so there'll be two marquees of buttons and then the 3rd and 4th button marquees can be replaced with one marquee for stamps? But I'm not sure yet. I've adjusted the sizing and placement of the marquees and webrings so they're nicer on both desktop and mobile. Two of the marquees have been merged. I might add one more marquee for stamps.

I also haven't figured out how to automatically hide the Webamp player on mobile devices (I think something in the scripts circumvents normal CSS), which is a shame because it's a bit large on those. I'm thinking I'll replace it altogether with an SCM Music Player? But I'm not sure. If I do, I'd have to make a skin myself (I don't like any of the existing ones), which is fine because I actually do have experience doing that for a Tumblr sideblog (which appears to be broken because even though I have the correct settings enabled it just redirects me to the dashboard. ugh). I'm a bit rusty, but it's whatever.

Last but not least, I've officially begun work on the DIVA Room! As some of you may know, the DIVA Room is intended to be the main attraction, but it's kind of a massive undertaking. Essentially, it's an Empty Movement-style fansite dedicated to all things Project DIVA, a now-dormant series of rhythm games that was very formative in my tweenage years. I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for PjD, so I want to give back to it and its community the only way I know how: by infodumping. Think of it as a supershrine.

For a general idea of what the DIVA Room is supposed to cover, you can take a look at the index here (it needs a background image, but I'll fix that another time)! None of the internal links work at time of writing, but that's okay. I'm not really intending it to be a wiki, but I feel like the concept itself kinda puts it in that territory. That's fine, too, because the existing wikis are either incomplete, dormant, inaccurate, hosted on FANDOM, or some combination of the aforementioned. I'm very thorough.

Honestly, I think the main thing that'll make progress on the DIVA Room slow is layouts. I'm very good at research and organizing that research, but terrible at layouts. The thing about Empty Movement that I love most is how each segment of the site has a unique layout, and I want to do something similar. It gives it a lot of personality, and I want to convey the personality of these games through unique layouts. I know that's overly ambitious, but I just can't help it! I must make it look pretty!!!

The first pages I'll be working on will be dedicated to the first game, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA (2009) for the PSP. I think it'd be kinda cool to recreate the game's menu layout? Maybe something with an iframe would look good... The reason I'm doing that first is because I actually have a page on my old Neocities dedicated to the hunt for a piece of related lost media: a demo from 2008 with different UI and additional mechanics. I think the general consensus among people active in the hunt is that it doesn't actually exist anywhere accessible to the general public (long story), and I'm inclined to agree. I hope it gets released someday, though.

And that's about it! I hope you all enjoyed reading this update. Please let me know what you think in the comments! I'm open to suggestions regarding the layout of both the main personal site and the DIVA Room, as well as cool things to add to either in general.