Misc. Cafe Updates
March 2nd Updates:
- Since it's 5 minutes past midnight, I might as well make this a March 2nd update. It doesn't exist yet because it's only been 5 minutes since March 2nd began, but I'm inspired to make I made an "art gallery" page of all the art objects I've collected! This will include (I'll link to it later in the day) a beautiful new linocut print I purchased in January and just had the pleasure of picking up today!
- I also replaced the 'about' page on my menu with a 'studio' page. I want to pack all my interests, hobbies, about stuff into one little corner of the site, and hopefully leave the rest as something more interactive. This means that eventually the 'photo' button on the menu will be placed with something else!
- I'm replacing the month/day/year digit format with actually typing out the dates of my entries on the cafe news and photojournal pages, to accomodate visitors from different regions of the world.
- I added an entry into my photojournal. It's just a bunch of old black and white photographs I found in a folder on my Neocities account.
- I'mma try to make sure I made the "Onio.Cafe" logo link to home on most pages. Before it wasn't a link. I know it's redundant with the "chat" page, but I find myself clicking that logo a lot instead of the chat button. Details matter, right?
- I might try to place the buttons in the footer in an iFrame so I can easily edit those as well. (I didn't get around to this and it's not at the top of my list right now. Another day!)
March 1st Updates:
- Aside from the main 5 or so pages, the site menu will no longer be baked into the code, but will be placed inside of an iFrame. Shout out to Chattable for the help with iFrames, and to zerock for advising against using JavaScript for reintegrating the menu.
- Reorganized the personal sites section of the links page to be a button wall, and added an additional section for websites I appreciate specifically for their pixel art.
Feb 28th Updates:
- Added a satellite to the solar system that servers as a solar system change log. From now on, all updates to the solar system will be posted there instead of here!
I'm doing a bit of early spring cleaning, perhaps as far as my website goes. One of the things I've not been looking forward to was what felt inevitable, the eventual editing of my site menu. With the introduction of "space," a new menu button was released, replacing the old "thoughts" icon in the menu bar. This mean going through each and every web page to adjust the baked in menu code to reflect the change. After doing that, I thought there must be an easier way.
At first I tried placing the menu inside of an iFrame, but every time I clicked a link, it opened a new page within the menu's frame, which wasn't good. I didn't know how to get around that yet, so then I tried using JavaScript, which worked okay, but since the menu is a fairly essential element of the website and since many users prefer to browse the web with JavaScript disabled, I was advised against using this solution by Zerock. Rather, Chattable tipped me off to 'target="_top"' in link tags when using iFrames, as it opens the new URL in the top most window. I did not know about that! I did notice that it's just a fraction of a second slower to load the menu than the rest of the page using iFrames, but it works! Thanks to both of these guys for their help!
For the main pages, I'll stick to the baked in code, and for all the smaller pages - the updates, the photo logs, etc., I'll use iFrames. I don't mind editing 5 or 6 pages to keep the front feeling snappy, but what I do mind is having to update 50+ pages every time I make a change to the menu! The menu portion of the smaller pages loading just a hair slower is fine by me if that saves 20 minutes of updating pages.
Let's take a moment to remember the old icons in the menu bar. R.I.P. to the GIFs we lost along the way.
"bubble.png"
Active from Feb/March 2023 to Feb 26th 2025.
"space.gif"
Active from Feb 26th 2025 to March 1st 2025.
Another thing I did was remove an old string of Kapersky script from a handful of older pages. I don't quite remember what they were there for.. but I do remember that they turned out to be the culprit behind abysmally slow load times back in 2023 (thanks to Melon for tipping me off to those a long time ago.) I had removed most of the issue back when I discovered it, but I didn't go back and edit every single page. Now I have.
Ultimately most of these updates (aside from maybe the satellite in the solar system page) won't really make a huge difference, but collectively, they make the website cleaner and easier for me to work with, and that might just have cascading effects with positive consequences down the road. For instance, I'll know how much improvement has gone into the website, and I'll feel more confident working on it and investing more time into it in the future! Which could then, y'know, snowball into more productive development :)
I'm already thinking about a few other details I'd like to add or improve upon. I would like a thought bubble tooltip to pop up over every link and image in these update logs. I would like to update the 'chat' icon. I know I'm going to merge the 'about' and 'photo' pages into something bigger eventually, perhaps a 'studio' page. And I think I'm going to replace the current 'photo' page with a fun project connected to my solar system project. I'm not settled on it, but changes are coming :3
This is the very nice linocut print I acquired, titled "A Strange Plant Growing Very Rapidly," editioned 1/2 and signed by the artist Veronica Cheyenne, who is a delight to speak with and who I think is very gifted artist who can really go places. I genuinely enjoy her work, and I'm very pleased with this 12" print which is now hanging on my wall!! I enjoy the form, I enjoy how it behaves almost illusory, I enjoy the rhythm of the repeating leaves, and I find that each leaf appears very natural in its form. It kind of reminds me of an icon, and vaguely reminds me of sneek's cursors. It's just an overall gratifying image with a beautiful texture, no doubt because it's printed on HANDMADE paper - handmade by the artist herself! She'll likely never see this, because I don't often share my Onio.Cafe IRL, I just seriously enjoy her work, and I would buy more if I could afford to (I'm a broke boy), and I think you should check out her Etsy page listed above!!!
A couple of random thoughts about the Internet. 1.) when I look through the link pages on peoples' websites, I experience some weird FOMO, and feel like I need to open every single website to experience them all, and then all of those websites have their own link pages, which I feel like I can't miss out on, and quickly this can become overwhelming with way too many tabs. 2.) I use the 'br' tag a lot, and every time I do, I think of Brazil, because I used to play this old game called Tibia during my childhood, and a lot of Portuguese players would walk around calling out, "Br?? Br??"
Before signing off, looking through all my files on here, I rediscovered a page for a sub-$100 computer club that I tried to create back in '23. I hope it entertains you!
All the best,
-Onio