What is the most time you've spent on something for your website?

[aribluejeans]

I'm curious! I've been spending a lot of time recently working on a shrine for Bratz: Rock Angelz for PS2 (and will follow with one for Bratz: Forever Diamondz for PS2). The thing about those games is that you can find playthroughs of it here and there but if you're looking for specific screenshots and assets from them you're pretty much out of luck.

This is all to say I've spent over 24 hours playing through the game to get every clothing item/hair and getting captures of all clothing/hair icons as well as what they look like on your character. Also makeup compacts! I now have a folder with 946 total captures and everything is sorted out into folders by what clothing range they come from and what type of clothing item they are. All of the captures are named with the name of the clothing item. I also spent even more time making SVGs for different parts of the covers. It was so much work, and I've barely made progress on the actual shrine!

So I'm curious to know: What is something you have spent a crazy amount of time on for your website?

[Memory]

OMG I LOVE the Bratz playstation games so much! Rock Angelz is such a blast from the past, and its mention is encouraging me to set up my ps2 again so that I can play it! Tangentially, I've been meaning to pick up the Bratz game on the switch but I've been reading that it's pretty short in comparison to previous titles... Also tangentially, but my League Of Legends name is Bratz LOL. Jade was my favourite <3 What about you?

Your page project sounds MASSIVE though and I wish you lots of luck with progressing and completing it! I'd love to view it when it's done!

As for my own answer... Probably just the very first home page I ever made for my website. It took me one week to complete, and I certainly made it more difficult for myself than I had to due to being a noob. Nowadays it takes me just a couple hours to completely finish a webpage, and even quicker for a homepage. And the code is a lot cleaner which is a nice bonus! But yeah, my first few pages took WEEKS to complete!

[honeybread]

wow! i love your dedication to those games. when you really love something, the hours can just slip away (stares at stardew valley... )

speaking of that game — i suppose that could count for me? i have about 2400 hours in that game and i'm developing a shrine based on my thousands of screenshots across multiple save files. however, i would've been playing regardless of developing a shrine, so...

outside of that, i think i've spent a crazy amount of time scrolling for the perfect tileable background, but who hasn't 

[bingus_baby]

People who dedicate that much effort into forgotten/ignored media have ALL my respect!!

I personally used to have a page on my desktop PC since the documentation on it was lackluster, but tbh... I think I am the only one who remembers, let alone uses that thing! (Gateway DX, if you were curious.) It got cut when I reworked my site some months back and shifted the focus from general webpage to only my art related projects.

But what I have spent some time on and kept is my scavenger hunt! It didn't take a whole long time, but making the buttons took a lil bit. Each takes about 30 min to make, so the whole hunt probably took 3-4 hours to design and implement. It's still a fan favorite of my site to this day!! Which is nice, since I'm really happy with how the buttons turned out.

(If you really wanna split hairs, I have art pieces on my site that took upwards of 8 to 10 hours, so those technically took the longest lol, but were not exactly made for my site!)

[devils]

OMG I often want to make stuff about games with a myriad of information about them and just can't bring myself to because of how tiring the process can get. 24 hours on a game specifically for a page? Now, that's dedication!

As for my answer- I spent a ridiculous amount of time on my subsite dedicated to text art, specifically the page about its history. It's such an interesting topic to me! Writing that was pretty hard though, as information about early text art isn't always easy to come across...

It took at least a day in all, I think. It got me into researching actually, ahah.

[aribluejeans]

Tangentially, I've been meaning to pick up the Bratz game on the switch but I've been reading that it's pretty short in comparison to previous titles...

Yeah, I've heard it's really underwhelming I might still pick it up in the future but the PS2 games will always have my heart.

Jade was my favourite <3 What about you?

My little sister and I always pretended we were Bratz and I was always Yasmin and she was always Cloe. Yasmin is my favorite but Jade has become a close second

[aribluejeans]

wow! i love your dedication to those games. when you really love something, the hours can just slip away (stares at stardew valley... )

Oh I love Stardew! I've been playing it a ton recently

i have about 2400 hours in that game and i'm developing a shrine based on my thousands of screenshots across multiple save files

That's awesome! Maybe someday I will do a Stardew shrine as well

[aribluejeans]

People who dedicate that much effort into forgotten/ignored media have ALL my respect!!

I appreciate that! I was complaining a bit to my spouse about all the work I needed to do but he pointed out that it's really neat that I'm gathering so many graphics that nobody else has bothered to document. And that makes me feel really good about doing it!

But what I have spent some time on and kept is my scavenger hunt!

Omg, it's so cute! What a fun idea, I've been wanting to add little secrets to my site.

Your art is incredible btw!

[aribluejeans]

OMG I often want to make stuff about games with a myriad of information about them and just can't bring myself to because of how tiring the process can get. 24 hours on a game specifically for a page? Now, that's dedication!

I'm not gonna lie, on the two ~8 hour days in a row that I spent getting the captures for everything, after I was done I did cry a little bit because of how mind-numbing it became I'm very glad that part is over now.

As for my answer- I spent a ridiculous amount of time on my subsite dedicated to text art, specifically the page about its history.

Oh, wow! I never knew that there were different types of text art. Thanks for sharing! Really cool to document all of that. It looks great, btw

[BlazingCobaltX]

I too think that my splash page and home page took the longest, simply because I had to also figure what the hell I was even doing! Even though I just finished a shrine which objectively took more time, it felt like less effort because I knew a bit more about how I could do the things I wanted.

[aribluejeans]

I too think that my splash page and home page took the longest, simply because I had to also figure what the hell I was even doing!

Makes sense! I do have a degree in web development but I can remember how it felt when I was first learning. I took a very long break after college so coming back to it, I felt a lot of those things again. I also think it just makes sense for those pages to take longer because it's kind of when you're figuring out what you're going for. By the time those pages are done you have more of an idea of what the other pages need.

Super cool site btw! 

[BlazingCobaltX]

Makes sense! I do have a degree in web development but I can remember how it felt when I was first learning. I took a very long break after college so coming back to it, I felt a lot of those things again. I also think it just makes sense for those pages to take longer because it's kind of when you're figuring out what you're going for. By the time those pages are done you have more of an idea of what the other pages need.

Super cool site btw! 

Thanks!! I love how this community brings together amateurs/self-learned people and professionals in web design and IT. Interestingly I've seen the more whackier, homebrew-looking website designs from the professionals. I guess it's easier for them to express the oddity of the old web, whereas I couldn't even attempt to do that.

Good luck with the Bratz shrines btw, I think they're worthy to be called wikis if you really fill them up with that much info.

[malice]

for me it's gotta be the evanescence graphics collection page. spending countless hours on various sites looking for graphics, renaming them, uploading them, having to split up the page into three pages because the site couldn't handle having all of them on one page, occasionally organizing them by album era and making folders and subfolders, writing each line of code and adding alt text (one time i had to add alt text to hundreds of them because i neglected to do it over the course of a few months >_< i've learned my lesson)... there's a little over 1000 graphics total now, it's more like an archive or museum dedicated to evanescence online fan culture at this point! it's been about a year's worth of work so far and i don't think it'll ever end :)

[aribluejeans]

for me it's gotta be the evanescence graphics collection page. spending countless hours on various sites looking for graphics, renaming them, uploading them, having to split up the page into three pages because the site couldn't handle having all of them on one page, occasionally organizing them by album era and making folders and subfolders, writing each line of code and adding alt text (one time i had to add alt text to hundreds of them because i neglected to do it over the course of a few months >_< i've learned my lesson)... there's a little over 1000 graphics total now, it's more like an archive or museum dedicated to evanescence online fan culture at this point! it's been about a year's worth of work so far and i don't think it'll ever end :)

This is INCREDIBLE. That's so so much work! It's so impressive and so cool that you gathered all of that and put so much work into those pages. I've been putting off writing alt text and I don't have nearly that many images yet so I find your dedication really inspiring. Awesome work!

[kiki & ayano]

i consistently spend multiple weeks on site updates to my pokemon fansite, due to having to document things that were not previously documented (researching, talking to experts, personal testing, gathering my own assets/screenshots/etc) and writing a lot of javascript for custom tools that did not previously exist. this ends up with the site only being updated every 1-3 months or so because i am fitting all of that work into my real life and other responsibilities and whatnot, plus my generally poor health.

that being said, nothing has taken even close to as long as my "Stadium 2 GIF Archive"... it's exactly what it sounds like, an archive of every idle animation of every pokemon, both normal and shiny versions, in Pokemon Stadium 2 on the N64, with transparency. despite the game being out for two decades, no one had ever made such an archive before, and i quickly found out why when i sat down to do it. i did attempt to get some volunteer help, and i am very thankful for the volunteer help i received, but i reached out so late in the project that the majority of the work (over 90%?) ended up being my own. this process included having to record, time, and sometimes even edit by the pixel, over 500 GIFs. i also had to redo almost all of the work at some point due to being unsatisfied with the quality of the project/GIFs very late in. a couple of parts of it were automated, but most of it was by hand, and it was very tedious. it took over half a year for the project to be completed, partially because it did genuinely take me over 200 hours of personal work, but also because i would take weeks-long breaks from it due to how intensive it was.

additionally, after completing all the GIFs, i wrote up an article documenting the hue shifting feature in Stadium 2 and created a hue previewer using my GIFs which took a good chunk of javascript work, since the built in hue-shift feature in CSS wasn't accurate to N64 colors. i genuinely have no idea how long the entire Stadium 2 GIF project took exactly; after all the months of work time really began to blur.

none of this is a complaint though, i'm incredibly proud of the accomplishment of finishing the darn thing, and i'm very happy to have the GIF archive, which is a resource i've always wanted. my GIFs are also now in use on sites like the biggest english pokemon wiki Bulbapedia and can be found littered over the internet. i wouldn't take back those dozens upon dozens of hours of work even if given the chance!

(by the way, i did backread this thread, and it's very cool to see other people also documenting old video game stuff! i am so passionate about video game preservation, it just really gets my neurons firing. it's also incredibly rewarding somehow. kudos to all the effort!)

- ayano

edit: clarified a couple of things, oops