DEV LOG 3 - A Push In The Right Direction (24 May, 2026)

This is extremely overdue considering the last long was almost exactly a year ago! I would say time flies but nono, time did not fly. I just couldn’t do anything for so long! However, I did still work when I could and here we are, showcasing everything I have done since last update.

Admittedly, there isn’t much to see considering a lot was done in the backend. The last log at the time was mostly about UI fixes and overhauls. This log will be more diverse and detailed.

MORE UI CHANGES

To begin with, I further tweaked the UI of the site and I think it is pretty much done and dusted now!

What I have done here is the introduction text is now inside a tidy box so it matches with the rest of the content boxes below. It looks less primitive this way and overall more compact especially with no painful contrast with the background. You can see in the image of two new selections previously never seen before, which we will get to shortly. Other UI additions was the site logo changing colour when hovered, blogs to have breadcrumbs so you know where you are when navigating the blog area and other CSS changes.

THEMES

This was fairly simple to create but it was tedious to fix my CSS to incorporate it! Previously my css was written with each element hardcoded with colours such as “blue". If I wanted to change the colour of one thing, I would have to scroll everywhere in my CSS file for other areas where that colour was stated otherwise we will have an ugly display of colours everywhere. CSS variables was the fix.

What I have done here is I have cited many variables with colours so in each CSS block, I just have to only write once the variable name and never have to go through every block which was extremely tedious. If I want to change anything, I would now just change the colours in the variables and tada!

This enabled a fun task to have themes on the website. The approach to the themes were somewhat challenging as I kept a strict rule of having it relate to Final Fantasy only. Initially, I thought of seasons or times of the day. It was impossible to find adequate themes for this approach as a consistent resolution of many images were impossible so I decided to be flexible and just do random themes that are distinct from each other.

A typical theme in CSS form was written out like this.

However, what was the functionality of the themes?

A theme box was created that shows a selections of themes when clicked and you can pick any theme without the page reloading as this was done via JS. Here is a new theme:

It really changes the vibe doesn’t it? Don’t worry, I won’t ever get rid of the moon. This is all designed to give a choice to the user so I don’t intend to remove content nor force anything. Whilst the themes might not relate to the Endwalker Moon, I very much do feel it does give “Kefkaberry Land" vibes. I personally find it cosy.

TIMBER MANIACS

This is an idea I have had for a while where it would act as a mini news and opinion piece from myself and such. I would not treat it as a newsletter (despite it kinda already being one) although it will detail relevant FF news and a deposit of opinions regarding FF or such (Could literally be a small sentence or two on my favourite track or such, it is an opinion after all). I expect this space to be busy eventually once I finish doing the basics of the site hehe. It is still really buggy, however that will be fixed in due course. It mainly serves as a nice little area for different content to work on and I think I will enjoy it!

This was something I wanted implemented for a very long time but a major challenge I had was I wanted to avoid hardcoding content such as the blogs. Hardcoding can be very tedious and bloating of a file especially if it is multiple paragraphs long. It makes it much more difficult to work with should there be any changes you wanted to make. So why not store everything in a different place and call it to your page when necessary?

DATABASES

This is where I spent most of the time learning and working on, which overhauled the site almost completely but in the backend. I learned SQL and working with mariaDB in the terminal which is daunting at first but it was fairly straightforward. You just have to keep notes on the syntax and what you have done since my approach was solely terminal based instead of a graphical UI so it was easy to get lost.

What did the databases serve to do? That is where my blogs and such are stored now. Instead of hardcoding into the html, I put them into the database and with PHP it will call out the correct blog and display accordingly. This made everything much more robust as it was easier to map where everything would be. The database would act like a library, the php would be the librarian finding the book for you, whilst the user would ask which book to get. It is best to catagorise your work and files so it is easier to trace and not get messy over time.

What went into the databases? Blogs, everything on Timber Maniacs, Whats New and content in the FF8 section. Photos will be added to the databases soon (I am just lazy) but for FF8 content?

Final Fantasy 8 Page

This is where a lot of changes occurred and what truthfully inspired the database approach. If I wanted to showcase some FF8 content, having it inside a robust database made logical sense.

Don’t judge my notes, I know they didn’t make sense!

Since databases was a new concept to me (ignoring that I did plenty back in Secondary School) I wanted to make a rough plan of the database to ensure I was actually making a plan worth seeing through that can do more than just serve one item of interest. My rough sketch did give an outline tthat served as a starting point that I have yet to fully realise but I thought to start with an easy database. The GF database!

I went through every single GF and its abiltiies to display them on a single page. It was tedious at first since I wasn’t comfortable with the SQL syntax but eventually it all worked out really nicely!

This is the landing page of all the GFs available and when you click on their portraits, their associated details will show up. All these details were stored in a database with PHP calling the selected GF details to display to the user. It honestly felt really powerful seeing it work so nicely, it kinda grew into an obsession. To think I did this last year late May/June and just never talked about it.

Plenty more can be added and represented via a database. You can begin to already imagine such, for example all the triple triad cards can be in a database now instead of being hardcoded into html. It is magical isn’t it?

The main update overall is databases since it is weaved into almost everywhere in the site now and plenty more to come from that. It has made everything more manageable and easier to trace.

However, if syntax is difficult and somewhat unintuitive to input such long texts eg blogs into SQL, what can be done? It is absolutely terrible to even consider long entries into the terminal because if you make a mistake, it can just get visually messy and frustrating to deal with. I however have implemented a means to navigate around these issues and make it so much easier for me. I will go into detail of that one in the next dev log since it involved a lengthy script I made back in June. Almost a year later and where have I been…. I have my excuses!

What were my priorities again? Ah yes the sky pirates den, would you believe I had forgot? Of course you did.