Catchup[0]

V3 of my website has been live for around a month, and I'd like to bundle a bunch of the stuff that's happened since into a tidy little blog post.

Ads via Carbon

(Since removed)

I'm not a big fan of advertising. It's privacy invasive, impedes the user experience, and makes the UI look horrible. Meet Carbon. Carbon is a "project" by BuySellAds, and it's unlike any other ad network I've ever seen (not that I've seen many). If you've been on fireship.io or regexr.com, that's what they use.

Just from a first glance, you can see how different it is. Carbon allows you to use your own custom css, meaning you can tailor it to the vibe of your site, and not have it stand out like a sore thumb. Not only that, but it also is very privacy-friendly, and doesn't siphon your data away to be sold for a profit. But wait, it gets better. Carbon is carefully vetted for both publishers and advertisers, meaning you get ads by Digitial Ocean and MongoDB instead of malware download links that try and get you to click big green buttons.

Believe me, if I didn't like Carbon, I wouldn't have put it on my website. I've already jumped through many hoops to keep the data of users on my website secure (like using Cloudflare's anonymous analytics and a custom Stripe redirect to not have to load the "threat protection"), and I'm not going to sacrifice it for profit.

If your adblocker is enabled, you'll get a short message from me about disabling your adblocker. I don't wan't to ruin user experience for profit. I've said it once, and I'll say it again; If someone wants to support me, then they can choose to do so. I'm not going to force anything upon anyone.

Moving away from Vercel

Vercel is awesome. They have a refreshingly sleek and modern UI, a very generous hobby tier (the free tier), integrate wonderfully with their framework, Next.js, and have a unicode character that perfectly shows their logo (⯅). When I finished v3, I deployed my website to Vercel. Everyone worked fine for 12 days, when I got an automated email from Vercel. I had depleted the 100GB bandwidth limit. In 12 days.

I died inside, and after some discussion with Varedz, I concluded that I would split my website in two. The frontend would be hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the backend would be running on Heroku. This move vigintupled (x20) the bandwidth from 100GB to 2TB. Now, traffic would only matter on the backend, since Cloudflare Pages has unlimited bandwidth. Bless the souls of the Cloudflare developers. Oh, and Vercel as well. After frantically rewriting the backend and separating it from the frontend, I deployed both, and here we are.

Themes

Back in the days of v2, I wanted a theming system. Due to v2 being pretty messy and non-modular, this was harder said than done. While making v3, this came across my mind, but I scrapped the idea due to not wanting to overscape a project that I already grealy overscoped.

Later down the road, after being pressured by Ljabert, I decided I might as well. I had to refactor my styles to use CSS variables instead of Sass variables, but it sure was worth it.

The (albeit small) community instantly picked this up, and we've cultivated a growing collection of user-submitted themes you can check out in our Discord server.

Discord server

Speak of the devil! About a week before the launch of v2, I decided to make a dedicated server (Sorry Keiji! 😅) in order to keep things professional. The server's been around for a while now, and I've post various sneak peeks and changelog updates there. If you want to stay in the loop, join us! Donors get a special role and a special channel! If you're not yet sold, we also have community submitted themes, so you can spice up your experience.

Omori

Spoiler

On a more casual note, I got Omori at the beginning of November. It's a phsychological horror game with a very unique art style. If you didn't know, there's a character in this game. His name is Basil.

After learning that, I decided I had to eventually play this game.

As of writing this, I haven't finished the game. I've been playing it with a friend, and that friend is currently occupied by some stuff, so we'll finish the game once he has some free time.

Advent Calendar

This December, I decided to do something productive. Every day of the month, I would release a new feature. After a few days, I realized that this simply wasn't realistic, so I made the criteria swapping between a theme and a new feature every day. Although I missed a few days due to some irl stuff, it's been quite fun. Oh, and I might do something cool on Christmas day, but we'll just have to wait and see. ;)

I've done so much that I've started running out of ideas. I have a small list of things I could do, but the entries are slowly dwindling. If you have any suggestions for new features or improvements (no, I will not write a cheat for your favorite .io game), join my Discord server and shoot me a dm!

Cheers, Basil