Fedran Website Improvements
I wasn't really sure what to do for the week (I like week-based projects), so I put out a request on my social networks. By the end, I had an overwhelming suggestion to work on Second-Hand Dresses[1] but initial responses were to focus on improving my fantasy website, Fedran[2]. Since I only asked an hour before my lunch break (the first time I work on personal projects), I decided to spend the week on the website and this week on Second-Hand Dresses.
1: https://fedran.com/second-hand-dresses/
A lot of the items on my to do list for the site were annoyances: getting it to look right on my phone, making it easier to read, and missing connections between elements. I also wanted to adding some advertising for my big projects (the Rutejìmo[3] series right now).
3: https://fedran.com/rutejimo/
Appearances
One of the first things I did was fix some of the little things that were bothering me about the website, links and appearances. Somehow, I managed to redo the colors and SASS stylesheets of the page giving a more varied appearance.
The new colors were chosen from a fantastic website called Paletton[4]. This lets you pick a color from a wheel and it gives you the triads or tetrads based on it. The color I picked ended up having a nice mixture and it quickly grew on me.
4: http://paletton.com/#uid=72A0u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF
POV and Volumes
I also started to really embrace the POV and volume organization that I've talked about earlier. Most of the links that can be associated with a specific POV, volume, or both have a new appearance. The number is also the alias, so https://fedran.com/0100-02[5] will send readers to Sand and Bone[6].
6: https://fedran.com/sand-and-bone/
I also got the list of volumes on the proper character pages, so Rutejìmo[7] will list every book or story that he's the main character.
7: https://fedran.com/rutejimo/
Journals of Fedran
The first “big rock” of getting stuff done was integrating my Journals of Fedran[8] with the website. Journals started off as an in-world newspaper but eventually morphed into a single-author collection of short stories, in-world essays, and poems.
8: https://fedran.com/journals-of-fedran/issue-00/
I decided to make all of the stories and essays “first-class” entries on the website. This was because I already had already created top-level pages for every play, essay, and even person referenced by the epigraphs that I put on top of the chapters. If I was going to do that, why not the others.
Naturally, this led to creating a standard landing[9] page for all those things which also reference the POV character, related pieces (some of them will have multiples later). This made a lot of broken links, but I think it is looking good as a framework. Everything is usable, I just haven't written up every person or point of view character that showed up in those short stories.
9: https://fedran.com/sand-and-bone/
Each of those stories also show up on the front page, down in the “Sources” section. This is also a good way of encouraging myself since I can see a list of “what I've done”. Later, the front page will be only significant projects while the sources page will have the full list.
Timelines
The final major task was putting in a timeline[10]. I've wanted this for some time now, mainly because I'm tagging the chapters of when they happened but I also want to show the overlapping stories that may or may not interact with each other.
10: https://fedran.com/timeline/
This took a lot of work, another post-worth actually. In the end, I can annotate almost any character, story, or chapter with information about when they happened and it will show up on the timeline along with the ability to link back to the original.
I also have an info-box like entry on the individual pages, which then are scanned by the build process, inserted into the YAML header, then gathered by another process which renders the JSON file that runs the timeline. (Like I said, a lot of work.)
As time goes on, the timeline should get a lot more populated. I also found some typos with dates, which I'll fix as I go. Mostly, I think it's already cool to see how things relate to each other. The control will let me zoom and pan, which means the more complicated events will spread out as needed.
What's Next
Because of the overwhelming response, I'll be working on Second-Hand Dresses in the next week and see if I can get further along with that story.
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Below are various useful links within this site and to related sites (not all have been converted over to Gemini).
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