#34 24/2/2022 - Buffy Sainte-Marie - The War Racket

Ooo, Iv so many projects to work on but Iv had Fable Anniversary (The same game just with revamped graphics I think?) sitting in Steam for YEARS waiting to be played. I will try and force myself to finally play it this month

I'm not sure how popular it is with Fable fans but I really enjoyed Fable 3 (Its the only one I played, in fact its one of the like 5 games I ever completed)

#33 21/2/2022 - Joan Baez - Fountain of Sorrow

Sooooooooo, my newsletter is a lot less complex than you think. I have a fancy e-mail collector that I made in Node.js, but all it does it put e-mails in a list in my address book and then auto sends a welcome e-mail to whoever signed up.

For actually sending newsletters, I just use Thunderbird with a plugin that lets me edit e-mails as HTML. So then all I do is design the e-mail like any webpage and then paste the code into Thunderbird in HTML edit mode and send it to my mailing list like any normal e-mail.

Lessons I have learned doing html e-mails and newsletters:

• Every image must use a full external link like https://melonhead.pasta/myimage.png
• You cant style the body tag, you need to create a wrapper div and style that, its an e-mail limit apparently
• Some e-mail clients will mess with your style trying to make the e-mail dark/light mode
• E-mail HTML is super limited so don't try anything too fancy
• Always put your mailing list in the Bcc recipient section or you will leak everyone e-mails
• Check how many e-mails your provider lets you send at once because if you need to send to a mailing list that has 100+ people, they might not like that. Most have a limit you can send every hour and day.

For you I think the first option; collecting e-mails with a google form or a microsoft form would work great and then you could send them out manually like me! Even a plain text newsletter is fine in most cases (but I do enjoy designing them more) and if your list ever gets too big you can move over to one of the professional services later.

I wouldn't worry too much about the unsubscribe issue, just end your e-mails with "reply with unsubscribe if you no longer want to receive my e-mails". In my year review e-mail I told people to subscribe their friends without telling them and I think a few people actually did that which was kinda funny, as far as I know no one got upset

Welcome! I took a look over your site, its very classic

Welcome to the forum nick
Good luck with the new site, remember that nothing is cringe and everything you make is worth saving

~Puts CS major hat on~

Ok so the question here is what other languages do you know and how well do you know them? For the sake of others reading this Ill assume little-none!

So C++ is a very old language (its from the 80s or something) so its got a lot of quirks and such that make it quite complicated to learn. Learning C++ is a bit like learning Latin before learning French or Spanish. It will make you a fantastic programmer and make all other languages easier, BUT it will be very hard.

If you're totally starting out, look up a "Programing Fundamentals" course (I like youtube courses, but there are books too) and do that, do this before you do anything else, this is good for anyone interested in code or even just computers!

After that the question Id ask is; do you want to be a PROGRAMMER or just make cool things with code? Being a programmer is a career, it takes years and will only suit some people, but everyone can learn a little code to make cool things.

If you want to be a programmer, than the best thing Id suggest is starting some small C++ projects. Prob the best way to do that is make a lil game in the Unreal Engine, it uses C++ and has a lot of help and tutorials you can follow. You can also try starting with C since it is even more basic and leads directly into C++. To help you along the way there are a few good tutorials out there, but really doing a project is the best way to learn.

If you just want to make cool things with code, don't worry about complex languages like C++, learn Javascript. Its much kinder you can do everything with it. (Id avoid PHP as its more limited, but its also a good starting option).

Hopefully that helps a little!

Disclosure, my first "fully" learned languages were (in this order, its a weird order) - C, PHP, Java, C#, Javascript
Languages I only partially know C++, Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Haskell, GML

Your welcome :omg:k: Ooph though, I was SUPEre into that song last year, I listened to it for a week solid! It seemed really obscure back then but now it seems to have become really popular (I think because of TicTok?). Its such a great song though, its so bittersweet

#32 19/2/2022 - Edison Lighthouse - Love Grows

Wow, welcome! That's a cool octopus Iv been looking at it for ages

perhaps somehow the entire leaf is functioning as some kind of eye

That's super interesting, it totally makes sense though since leaves are basically light sensors and eyes are also just complex light sensors. Although leaves are older than eyes, so maybe the plants have fungus forums where they tell each other about how animals have leaves

About a month ago I decided to learn how to make my own website

The world always needs more frames sites, we are in endangered species!

Something about this question reminds me of something Id have asked on yahoo answers around 2006

Of course! Although unlike most animals, humans have more complicated social rules, consent being the most important.

(Oh no its Melon posting another DW documentary!) This is a really good documentary for understanding how humans evolved and the links between our social cues and those in the animal kingdom. Great apes engage in petting, grooming and even casual sex as way of building social connections and relationships.

Between humans, the amount of physical contact we like relates directly to how close our relationship is with the other person.

Welcome Dojidave (Dodgy Dave? :grin:smile:

Anyway, sites can totally be a struggle and it took me like 5+ sites before I was able to make what I really wanted to make, so don't stress and enjoy the processes (if that's possible :ziped:smile: You'll get there eventually and its always worth it in the end. I feel bad for the crab though!

~Moved to music as it seems to fit here more~

I wanted to share a story about mixtapes that might hopefully encourage people to get into mixtapes and physical media more.

In 2017 my grandad passed away and my granny was getting rid of a lot of his stuff, I grabbed a handful of old cassets of his so I could record over them with my own stuff. I did check them before wiping them and most were BBC radio shows from the late 80s, not very interesting. Then during 2020 lockdown I was thinking of making a mixtape of 70s music, so I looked at the cassettes I had and picked one that looked like it had a kind 70s mixtape vibe.

When I check it though, it was not a radio recording, it was a mixtape of songs from around 1972, a great if kinda weird selection, but fun to listen too (70s pop and rock). I was able to copy it to my computer and send it out as an mp3 to family. My mum and uncle and aunt all remembered it being played constantly in the car when they were little kids and had not heard it since.
Now its become a kind of family playlist again, Iv seen it show up on my uncles phone, my mum has a CD version in her car, and who knows maybe Ill end up playing it for my kids someday.

I think its a really lovely way to remember my grandad and it could never have happened without the physical media surviving and me being into retro tech and making mixtapes of my own. So make your mixtapes and look after them! You never know what they will become to someone in the future!

(i wish the pages wouldnt flicker from white to black when it loads, but idk how to fix that)

I think if you move <script src="/theme-control.js"></script> into the head, it will load before the page loads and might help??

I agree with everyone above, but I'm gonna play the devils advocate! Lets assume you want views at all costs, how do you do it?

Firstly, why do views matter? Well views only matter if you have ads to profit from them, or some other value your getting from the views. So if you plan to get a lot of views, setup ads or sell stuff! (Remember this means your site is really about selling and not about you)

Next, get a good metrics system like GoatCounter, this will tell you info about your views and where your traffic is coming from. Its important to understand that there are bad views and good views. Bad views come from bots and are not worth much, good views are real people who visit your site.

Once all that it setup you should know, why you want views, and where most of your views are currently coming from.

Now, how to actually get more views:
1. If your on neocities, just spam follow everyone, I mean everyone! Follow like 50 people a day, if even 1/4 follow you back you'll still get dozens of followers. Followers = Font Page = Views. If your not on neocities, see if there is a similar system you can use on your platform.

2. Spam your content across social media, reddit and twitter are prob the best for getting quick views. Make something funny like a page that shouts the word "Blasphemy" when you click a duck and share it everywhere. Remember though, social media views are temporary so find a way to hook your visitors in, get them to sign up to a newsletter or follow your tiktoc.

3. Link back link back link back, get people to link back to you. The best way to get links is to make a service that people link too, like a webring, or some sort of site content generator.

4. Get in with Google. Make sure your site fits the google standard and buy google adwords to improve your search ranking. This works best for particular topics, so if your site has a lot about Petz, buy words that people who are into Petz are into and make sure your site is always first on search results.

5. Make your site easy to access, make it work across all devices, don't have a landing page (those just scare people away). Make sure that every good view you get stays on your site as long as possible, employ infinity scrolling content etc to do this.

I think if you do all that you willll get a lot of views, but I think you'll prob have lost a lot along the way. Some of it I actually do recommend you do in moderation, get GoatCounter, follow a few people, share your best pages on social media. Just remember that unless you have a reason to need more views, there is not much point worrying about them, also remember that in the real world, views come and go, some times of the year people will be online more, other times less so, its always different.