If not for the people behind MDN, W3Schools, Stack Overflow, and many other lovely resources (which I'll list below), I probably would've crawled back to Wix after the fourth time that I broke something because I forgot to add a semicolon somewhere. Site's nowhere near perfect, my homepage especially, but building it has been a fun learning experience, so that’s enough for me (for now).
Some basic information first:
- Bookshelf homepage was built separately from the rest of the site, which uses Awhe's "Original" template as a base
- Fontwise, (h)eadings use Silkscreen and (p)aragraphs use Days One
To create the bookshelf directory on my homepage, I used Photopea, EZGif's gifmaker, and an Image Map Generator. I'd originally imagined the bookshelf as a more interactive feature where the books would light up if a visitor hovered their mouse over each book's respective section of the shelf, in the style of 90s point-and-click computer games, but a few hours of trial-and-error revealed that I'd need to use jQuery to create such a feature. So, switching gears, I started looking into image maps and image map generators at the recommendation of Stack Overflow users. I figured that I could still recreate the look of a point-and-click program by using an animated gif as the base of the map instead of a static image. From there, I used Photopea to create + edit the individual frames needed to animate the gif, EZGif to actually create the gif, and then Image Map Generator to, well, generate the image map using the gif.
As for my :) random redirect button, I used a script shared on Stack Overflow. I've included the following projects in my own list of redirects:
- Anything That Moves Archive (archive.org) (carrd), digitized + compiled by Jes, Kravitz, Johanna, & Brodie
- Black Film Archive, curated by Maya S. Code
- Internet Archive
- LibGuides Community
- Every Noise at Once, developed by Glenn McDonald
- Project Gutenberg, founded by Michael S. Hart
- Queering the Map, developed by Lucas LaRochelle
- Neocities’ browse sites page (so many fun & incredible sites)
And finally, my favicon (little icon on the tab itself) was made in Photopea and animated using EZGif. To not distract visitors, I've set it to loop no more than three times (but so it might only loop once).