I was thinking of trying to make some way for people to apply their own CSS across the site, that would allow you to edit colors and fonts and people could share different CSS styles.
Totally separate themes are also an option, however there are a few downsides, mainly they require a lot more work to maintain and bug fix.
So this is a quick post about a little study I conducted on a recent design change to GifyPet, its more of a quick note but I think there could be an intresting discussion around it.
On GifyPet I replaced my Melonking ad:
From this:
To this:
I then took note of the traffic coming from GifyPet to Melonking.Net before and after the change! And here are the results:
To me it seems pretty clear, following this image change, waayyy less people went from gifypet to melonking.net, yet to me both those banners look pretty good, I like both! I also ran this test again on Melonking.Net, I changed the navigator "Melon's Universe" to "Stuff", since that edit that page gets about 4x more hits.
I suppose in the case of the gifypet ad, the older one was more direct, and "Stuff" is more relatable than "Melon's Universe", but its interesting that these small design elements can have such a big impact on how people interact with a site.
It also raises the question, should we care? As people making retr:ha:weird and otherwise not usability optimized sites, is this something we should even worry about at all? I'm curious to hear your thoughts and learn if you've ever done such a test?
Feeds are way cool, that's my official stance on the matter!
I use a notification feed app for this forum and my guestbook: RSS Bot - It gives me desktop notifications whenever there is a new post.
For more typical feeds I use NetNewsWire - It syncs feeds between my computers and iPad. I mostly use that for keeping up with other peoples blogs and a few company blogs I like. This one is pretty good: https://panic.com/blog/
No exactly original or new, but in 2014 me and a friend spent WAY too much money buying the lego pet shop and then spend like a weekend building it.
Also I found this weird facebook post while looking for the pictures and I wish I knew more... "June 2013 - So um.. someone skyped me today to let me know they made a lego mini figure of me... I guess that's kinda cool.... ..."
i think i've reached a point in my life where i just want quality, not quantity, in terms of my digital interactions. i'd like small groups to discover my project over time, in waves. i definitely would not want to explode in popularity. that's a lot of responsibility.
how do you think this fits into the widespread social media culture we've been living in? do you think this is an internalized response or just more yearning for nostalgia?
I was discussing this with my mum a while ago, shes a full time artist, so its a similar thing in relation to popularity of work and different ideas of success. We agreed that as you get older you have less need for validation. I'm in my 20s, so I still like quite a lot of validation, however its definitely less of a need than when I was like 14; by the time I'm in my 50s I suspect I really wont care at all Although sites/games are not side projects to me, they are my main purpose in life, so I'll always want some return from them.
Social media is all about validation, but its not really about acknowledging real work or accomplishment. An artist can have millions of likes on a work, but that's meaningless compared to having that work shown in a well regarded gallery, even if only a few hundred people see it there.
Nostalgia is a good way to start escaping social media, but if you get stuck in it your not going anywhere! So its a reaction at its best, and a yearning at its worst
I assume your including past/offline sites to let seeee:
2007 - Project Melon, my first site, hosted on apples free site hosting 2008 - Frog and Wood, site of graphics and cool downloads, the archive is on MK 2009 - I made a site for selling floppy discs, free site hosting 2011 - Meloncraft.com, my minecraft server site, hosted on Amazon s3 2012 - Nonit.me my first personal site, amazon s3 2012 - Total remake of Meloncraft.com 2012 - HANA, novelty project in college, hosted on a university server 2012 - Metrokie, a social network I made with PHP, hosed on Godaddy hosting I think 2013 - Okicraft.com, a website for my later minecraft server, some small paid hosting service 2013 - Okicraft forum, a fully handmade forum written in PHP that connected to minecraft 2014 - LoyLoy, a new website for my 3rd major minecraft community, hosted on DigitalOcean 2014 - Total redesign of Nonit.me using flat ui and bootstrap 2016 - Melonking.net, neocities site 2016 - Okicraft revival site (the community was no longer run by me but I did a site for it), code reused on my "Stuff" page on MK 2016 - GifyPet, neocities site 2017 - Daniels Network Search, search engine written in Java - Redesigned and converted to NodeJS in 2021 2018 - Total remake of nonit.me - Code later reused on games section of MK 2019 - Mini portfolio site that was latter scrapped 2020 - SnortStudio, later scrapped and features became MelonEngine/first Ozwomp game 2020 - Ozwomp.net, later scrapped and features rolled back into Melonking.net 2021 - MoMG, neocities gif gallery 2021 - Total remake of nonit.me
I think that's all of them! I included remakes that were big enough count as a new site, but left out modification jobs like this forum that were based on existing code.
Well, today's been quite an unusual day, because we got a bit too active... and the image for the "three star" rating for forum activity rating links to a 404 (specifically https://forum.melonking.net/Themes/pimp-my-classic/images/star3). Two and one star ratings have worked fine in the past before...
Seems to be that it's linking to a file that doesn't exist/was moved.
Viewing on Win10 Chrome.
Thank you for this report! It should be fixed now (The image link was missing the .gif)
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