i found some old adoptions in the vast expanse of the internet archive. do you know what that feels like? it feels like winning the fucking lottery. anyway, they've been added to the adopt page. i also added a little 'up' icon, to indicate what's been 'up'dated. i decided not to go with 'new', because that felt a bit disingenuous lol
09.03.24
i've been mostly working on another project, but tonight i decided to add a bunch of adoptions to my toybox pages. mostly there are additions to the sozai section, but also some studio ghibli sprites & a bunch of new dachshund icons i found :>
08.30.24
recently, i've done a bunch of reading & watched a lot of videos on ~pixel art~ techniques & methodology, and started reworking some of my older pixels with some of these ideas in mind. today i redid my personal favorite pixel, my heart calculator. i bought it in a little shop i used to work at in college after falling in love with it, and it's sat prettily on various shelves in every apartment i've lived in since.
08.29.24
i added a virtual pets section to my toybox~ it's pretty small right now. if i'm less lazy another day, maaaaybe i'll add my neopets there
08.25.24
i made a little journal pixel while working on some icons for another project, and decided to do a few color variations and make it an adoptable. side note: i do try to use other color palettes, but rainbow always seems to win.
08.24.24
i added a loading indicator to the toybox pages, which i think is a better experience than images sporadically being loaded. i also updated the mobile layout of the toybox pages so that the nav sits above the page content now, allowing both to take up 100% page width, which looks a lot cleaner. those were the major ux changes i've been wanting to make, so i think i am pretty much done with those for now & can just focus on just adding new content~
edit// jk, i lied. i added a cute sparkly animation to the header, because it's felt a bit plain ever since i increased the size of the main container. it's my first experiment using lottie for animations :>
edit2// i've been meaning to remake the background for this website for ages, and finally got around to doing that. the original was a free bg made by kimikat in like, 2000. i slowed down the animation a bit to use for this website, but it was very low res and had a lot of rough, pixelated bits. i basically just rebuilt the same design using vectors in figma & did a quick animation in photoshop, so it's much smoother and 2024-friendly now. here is the original, for reference.
08.18.24
i've been on a journey today, y'all.
i'd been meaning to refactor this website to use reusable components for the header/nav/footer
elements that exist across multiple pages, because maintaining them in 20 diff places is super
annoying and inefficient. i finally decided, "ok, i'll just use php includes, those are easy to
implement". then i realized that neocities doesn't support php, lmao. of course it doesn't. my
next iteration used javascript to insert php from externally hosted template files into the html
of my neocities website. this DID work, but it was inelegant and clunky, and i was unsatisfied.
finally, i decided to try out eleventy, which is a super simple, lightweight static site generator, and leverage the
templating functionality. this was the clear winner, and 10000x cleaner. i've mostly avoided
static site generators, having messed around a bit with hugo (i found the setup annoying), but
i'm really impressed with eleventy. there was almost no setup, and very little config needed. it
pretty much just worked out of the box with my existing html/css/js, and i was also able to
re-use the templates i'd already created earlier for php includes. amazing. i'm going to
actually read the docs, now, and figure out what else i can leverage, but bigtime win for
eleventy.
i also configured github actions deployment for neocities (ty nenrikido for the tutorial on this) which will make life a lot easier. honestly, i feel like adapting the the
specific quirks of neocities has been such a ride. i have a lot to say on it, but here isn't the
place :>
08.16.24
i've been in a bit of a creative slump for awhile, but i finally dragged myself out to, at last,
make myself a button. it's not much, but it's more than i've made in awhile!! very big shoutout
to robyn and pomelo for the inspo & encouragement :>
08.14.24
i finally have a real button for this website thanks to the wonderful robyn ♥ look at how cute and jiggly it is!
i made some adjustments to my about page, but nothing major. i'm working on something new rn >:]
08.13.24
housekeeping~ i updated the toybox page categories to replace the 'kaoani' category with 'sozai.
i felt like the 'oldschool' category was getting too massive with al of the sozai and icon
material, and decided it made more sense as it's own category that encompassed kaoani. i'm using
the term 'sozai' a bit loosely, here - it isn't just web materials, but general pixel art &
icons from japanese websites. in the case of kaoani, i'm keeping the ones made by non-jp artists
on there, also, because whatever.
you may need to do a hard refresh (cmd + r) to see the updated page, but it's here ♥
i also added an archive for older updates below, because this page
was getting embarrassingly long :')
08.11.24
i added a www section for links and such. i originally wasn't going to have links on this
website (i have them on my other website), but it felt wrong.
i also launched my ~revived~ sanrio clique, sanrioness yesterday. sanrioness was a super old sanrio fan clique i made with my friend
phoebe back in 2002, which i decided to revamp and relaunch for funsies. check it out and join
if you're a sanrio fan ♥
08.09.24
i've been wanting to make adding new adoptions to this page more efficient since, basically
always. until now, i've been adding every image manually, including it's link + respective
alt/title attributes. OBVIOUSLY that is insane, inefficient, terrible practice, and very
difficult to maintain. finally i decided to make a custom component to handle adoptions, and i'm
very pleased with it.
basically, my image file directory structure is [category] > [creator name] > [image 1], [image
2], [image 3], etc
all i have to do now is provide a category, creator name, url, and some attribution text (for
alt/title text) and the code checks the specified directory for images, then spits them all out
on the page linked to the provided url & using the provided alt text. this saves an enormous
amount of time and lines of code, especially when there are a lot of images from one creator.
consequently, i decided to kill the tabs on the toybox page and just made each section it's own
page. it's not really ideal, but the tab + lazy loading code was brittle and annoying to work
with, especially when using the custom component for adoptions. eventually i'll work on a better
approach, but for now, it just wasn't worth the effort continuing to maintain.
08.07.24
i've been tweaking my own stuff again~ i haven't felt very creative, but recoloring stuff &
practicing making color palettes has been a nice compromise.
08.05.24
i decided to update the layout on this website so that the content box was a lot bigger - it's
been driving
me crazy for awhile, especially given how much content is on some of the pages. i might play
around with the
header now that it's like, half the size of the container div... originally, i wanted this
layout to be
reminiscent of the simple table frame layouts of the early aughts, but it looks so empty now lol
:'(
07.30.24
ahhhh! i was browsing random old websites on the the wayback machine (as i often do), and came across an adoption of tina's that i had been *missing* !!
this is about as exciting as things can get for me these days, lol. it's a cute little star pop, which you
can find on the adopt page now.
07.23.24
i took a long vacation, and breathed a lot of fresh air. my brain is kind of like, "huh, what's a website?"
right now, so i'm doing some mindless tasks like organizing. i have another mini trip in a couple days, so
i'm not doing anything too intensive. i added a bunch of pixels to my 'new' toybox, today. although many are from older websites that are just still
alive...you get the point, right?
07.04.24
i got a domain for this website - hello mooncandy.toys ♪
07.02.24
i added a bunch of sailor moon sprites from some of the video games, which come from an archived version of
lycentia's
sm graphics. lycentia's website was massive for sailor moon girlies in the early 2000s, which i
obviously was.
i've been taking a course on vue.js, and i'm going on vacation soon, so i'll prob be a little slower with
updates for a bit. i'm planning on starting a new project once i finish my course n_nv it'll be a fun one
06.25.24
i got rid of the enter page bc i realized it was kinda pointless. it's my dog ponyo's 10th birthday today -
happy
birthday, ponyo! ♥
06.24.24
i fixed some
mobile
responsive alignment issues for older iphones, and added a page top quick link for the toybox page, since
you
need to do a fair bit of scrolling there (especially on mobile)
edit: i added a ton of new pixels to my oldschool toybox from punch★gum and yupidle, two of my all-time fave early 2000s jp icon websites
06.21.24
i changed the main body font to one that supports japanese characters - じゃーん！ i don't like it as much, but
it
was bothering me that i couldn't write out kaoani 顔アニ, etc. i also added some
more adoptions in the toybox section, and will probably
continue to add a few more today~
edit: i added a font for kanji. nobody cares, jessica!! ps- remind me to never use a pixel font again lmao
06.20.24
i re-colored some of my adoptions - most of them i did about a year ago when i was first starting making
pixel
art again, and they're kinda rough. i'll probably continue to tweak them, because i'm still not happy with
them. i also made a little sulky princess jessica today~
06.18.24
i'm continuing to add more adoptions ♪ the ones added today are the really special to me. they come
from
kimikat, who's websites inspired me to start creating my own back in the day
i decided to merge the ancient + oldschool section (bc honestly, the line is blurry anyway) and add a kaoani
section instead. i loooove kaoani - they're such an iconic part of early internet history, and i happen to
have
a massive collection of them. i should have the revamped sections
up
soon.
edit: the toybox is updated now → gogogo!
there are only a few kaoani up right now. i think i need to find another font for this website, since this
one
doesn't support japanese characters :[
06.17.24
ok, i realized i need to do some performance optimizations on the toybox page (lazy loading) so i'm gonna
try
and launch today with that one under construction, and add it once i get the lazy loading to work. we got
dis.
edit: we are live, y'all woohoo
edit 2: the toybox is live now and the script works, but it's rough. adding a refactor to my todo bc i don't
feel like doing it right now!!
edit 3: wow i realized neocities doesn't support .htaccess, and i don't know any other way to disable
directory
indexes without putting an index file in every directory. which i did. take that!
06.16.24
i've been working on adding adoptions, which is half fun, half intensely dull. i'm almost at a point where i
can
publish this website, and then just continue to add content. today i did all of the dachshund images, made
the
enter image, and fixed up the enter page a little in general. i'm going to focus on fixing up some little
details & testing for launch (yayay)
06.13.24
i took a break from making this to play like, 200 hours of harvest moon. oops.
today i started working on the toybox, which is the most complex page and, of course, the one i saved for
last.
i set up category tabs, which, after some sighing and teeth grinding, turned out pretty cute. FUN FACT, the
most
annoying part of working with rainbow palettes is figuring out how to divide all of your elements by 6 to
fit
all the colors nicely. now i just need to add the adoptions...eek.
06.08.24
i've actually finished most of this website, i think? i updated the fonts, styled lists, finished about &
credits pages, created the footer background, uhh some other stuff? i need to decide on some final font
colors,
finish the enter page, and start on the toybox page. maybe do a favicon and some other misc little
images/animations.
edit: actually, i thought i'd spend like 4 hours making a creepy marquee mobile responsive
and x-browser compatible instead.
06.06.24
i started working on this website today. happy birthday louis!
