Blogs

v2.3 - (11/29/23)

  • v2.3.6 - Moved the site over from Neocities to a VPS off Contabo! (01/11/23)
  • v2.3.5 - Fixed a linking issue on the 404 page. (12/27/23)
  • v2.3.4 - Updated the currently section on the index, fixed some misinfo on the MGS codecs article, and added some new drawings to the MGS shrine homepage! (12/19/23)
  • v2.3.3 - Fixed up some stamps, added a button, and most importantly posted my first article on codecs to the MGS shrine. (12/07/23)
  • v2.3.2 - Added stamps to the MGS shrine, as well as some new art to the shrine's gallery! (12/06/23)
  • v2.3.1 - Made the MGS shrine responsive. (12/05/23)

Procrastinating the actually important site updates with a mini update and a new shrine!

  • MGS Shrine - What it says on the tin: the landing page for a new Metal Gear shrine to tide over my brainrot.

MGS Shrine

Something I've noticed about my webdev workflow is I tend to spend a bit too much time perfecting each page before launching it, which would be great if I did this for a living! But at the end of the day this is just a hobby project, and one I use to decompress when life gets rough. My point with this being, it's gotten to the point where I stress so much over making each update perfect that it's starting to make this project a chore, which is the last thing in the world I want!

All this means that I'm going try and take a new approach to these updates. Every shrine doesn't need to be its own elaborate fansite, if something breaks it's a breeze to go back through and fix it. This shrine is me trying to unlearn that perfectionism... at least as much as I can. It's by no means my favorite part of this site, but even then I'm really happy with it! I'm proud of how I managed to keep it all to one landing page, and how I built it with expansion in mind without it being a project I tackle all at once.

A very rough and unfinished color map for the MGS shrine.
A basic color layout map for the shrine, mostly focused on color scheme & aesthetic.

I jumped right into the code for this page...mostly at least. I tried writing out the text contents before anything, which helped a lot with pushing out of those slumps of staring at my screen trying to figure out what a section could possibly be used for. From there I drew a very quick layout, more focused on color than anything. It took me a while to figure out what I even wanted the page to look like.

In the end I settled with a codec-inspired color scheme, perhaps in the future I'll experiment with themes (I still have the code lying around from early v2.0...).

A screenshot of the MGS1 codec UI.
The visual inspiration for the MGS shrine, I just love the colors and blocky motifs on this UI!

There's lots of fixes and mini-updates to come with this shrine; actually publishing that article I started, as well as adding some deco around the page expanding the outlinks section, and most importantly making an actual fanart gallery.

On that note, I snagged the code for the gallery masonry from here. I'll experiment with it some more in the near future to differentiate it more from the source & tailor it more for this site, but I highly reccommend giving that article a read if you're interested in a pure CSS masonry grid!

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