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Recently I have been making some serious updates to the ShyStudios website! I’ve gone through and fixed many unintentional spelling and grammar mistakes that were present on some pages. The articles page is now very pretty with each category having its own color! The links page (everything else) has gotten similar treatment. Both pages have also gotten a few changes to improve readability.
I have significantly changed the footer on most pages, the cool 88x31 buttons now only show up on certain pages where they are more appropriate. Otherwise the footer has simply changed to a site navigation section/copyright date. Occasionally the 88x31 buttons will appear on articles, but right now they are only on the about page and the links page. I felt they just kind of looked out of place on every single page, but I didn’t want to fully remove them.
I also felt kind of strange leaving the “Made with MacOS” 88x31 button on every page. Although the site was originally written on OSX (back when it was a frame based site) and the navigation images on the homepage were made using Aldus Type Twister in OS9.2; the VAST majority of development on the site after the first year or two has been done on windows.
In other news ShyStudios now has a public BBS! There is a link to it on the everything else page. Thanks to Kuz, Kaguya, and some of the anon-sans on the Heyuri Ayashii BBS for helping me figure out this software. For some reason I chose the original Japanese only version, but I’ve gone and added some of the translations from the Heyuri version. Although I am too retarded to figure out how to add the kaomoji buttons! I have NEVER touched PHP in my life!
Speaking of Heyuri, I have removed the link to twitter on my newtab page, replacing it with Heyuri; the best imageboard as of now. This means I will stop opening a new tab and looking at twitter (which never has anything new because I have so many accounts blocked) over and over and over again. Just the requirement of typing 3 letters is enough to make going on twitter a chore. My newtab page has always been in the everything else section if you want to see it.
Speaking of twitter, I have decided to fully remove my dependence on twitter as an image host and just fully let ShyStudios host all of my image content. I will still likely post every image to twitter as I did (and why I used twitter to host in the first place), but now if twitter goes away I don’t have to fix the images on ShyStudios. This also means almost every page on ShyStudios now makes NO requests to 3rd party servers. The exceptions being the pages that have youtube videos embedded. I am considering changing these youtube embeds to Vidlii embeds.
When testing I discovered the Vidlii embed player will always try to embed the flash player video player before the normal one, thus creating a warning on the browser so this might not be a viable option. I personally don’t care but also I do think it looks ugly when your browser is yelling at you for no real reason. If anyone finds any other 3rd party requests being made on the main site please let me know via email or BBS. Make sure you shift or ctrl or whatever refresh first to get the non-cached version of the site.
I have also decided to change the fonts on the entire site. Thanks to a post by a Heyuri user on my bbs, I have changed the default fonts to be a lot more compatible and semi accurate across most systems. The article font will still be using Source code pro or more likely Consolas as it was intended but will still fall back to monospace. That also means the site will likely be using Noto Mono site wide on linux systems without any CJK fonts. Almost everything else including my bbs will be using ms gothic, falling back on various other CJK monospace fonts. I have also totally removed the usage of google fonts from the site, making ShyStudios one step closer to being fully off-grid. Oh and the site should now work a lot better on text only browsers due to the new alt text on many important images. I also seem to have fixed the stupid 503 errors that have plagued the site for a few years. This had something to do with my nginx config, and should no longer be an issue. This means no more broken images on the site!!!
The last thing is the most important one, I have finally, after years and years of running this site, set up a way to automatically sync my local copy of the site with the live server. Before this I would make changes on my local copy, then manually upload an archive to the server and manually extract, change the permissions, then merge it with the live site. This was always a big pain in the ass. I also always had the slight chance of doing something wrong and messing up some of the other websites that are hosted on the server that are not my own.
IDK why I didn’t set this up before but now it is a simple ONE CLICK SYNC (okay a lil more but I don’t count accessing my local server interface as clicks). So now I can make changes and fixes to the site real time and have them updated with the quickness. Before I would make updates and changes and sit on them till I felt like pushing them all out in one big update. This also means I can actually write more articles for the site and have them uploaded the same day.
I hope to continue improving the website and writing more articles about various topics and things. If you like the website and want to keep the server running (the domain is another story) I believe this 17MHdKpoiRXuT9Ed7SkqEmTLuMpRMAtNB7 Is the bitcoin address that pays for the server. I don’t handle or own any crypto currencies myself so I usually just pay someone to have BTC sent there. I have no access to the address and it goes directly to the host of the server. Sending coin there doesn’t help me personally, but does keep the info here on-line as long as the server host still exists.
Even though there are multiple sites running on the one machine I believe ShyStudios is for whatever reason, set up as the “main” site. Meaning you should be able to just access it with the IP if the domain ever goes down. I am strongly considering getting a few backup domains going just in case too but I am not sure how this would affect the BBS.