DEV LOG 2 - FURTHER UI UPDATES (12/05/2025)

To be real there isn't much here, I just wanted an excuse to make another hehe.

Ever since the last log I said to myself that I wanted to take a break because I was happy with the changes. I had to do more, especially when the Photos page was operated as a table too and that triggered my OCD! This time it was simple, it would be the same as the blog UI but stripped down since the lack of albums means no filter tab required (It will be easy to reimplement thankfully).

Even though it was almost a simple matter of copy and pasting, I did encounter a lot of CSS problems along the way. My CSS file is just really big, approaching 2000 lines. Perhaps that is normal but ideally I would like to reduce as much as possible and I have a bad habit of leaving old CSS behind, especially unorganised. If you want to organise your CSS, for the love of god use variables. I also commented areas of my CSS so I can easily identify a section where I know what the bunch of styling blocks are for eg navigation, photos, blogs etc, so its easier to see when I scroll through.

The only real difference is now you get 5 images as a preview for each album before you decide to see more and a custom loading animation as the previews load! The extent I go for you people, I treat you with love and care like a family and yet none of you ordered me any MTG FF cards.

Loading animation:

Look at that, I even made the entire grid big for you so you can see my images, im so kind!

Furthermore, you surely noticed that each blog now has a faint blue background so you can read the text easier. Personally I thought it was a little difficult with the pink text but I think this makes everything look much cooler! Contrasts well with the text too. My only concern at first was that I did not want to cover the background, so the easy solution was to make it slightly transparent with the hexcode. Problem solved!

With almost all the UI fixed and overhauled, I think it is now time to tackle more important things such as FF8 content and other new implementations to the site. Perhaps the entire assortment of images in each album can be rewritten since well, it is very miserable to hard code the html for each image there. It is very tedious with how I have it initially set up which makes me hesitate to add more pictures but I will get to it, just not right now since it isn't a major priority.

I think adding some form of the Sky Pirate's Den is more of a priority don't you think?