Published on March 8, 2022

It has been almost two years since I posted an update to this site, and very little has happened in terms of projects related to this site. The truth is, my life has been complete chaos ever since the start of the pandemic and I've had had extreme difficulty finding motivation to start working on anything serious. Although things are looking better, there's been numerous false alarms over the last two years so I prefer to stay cautiously optimistic. That being said, a few months ago, I decided to take the time to do another refresh of the website. I actually more or less finished the rebuilding at the start of the year, although I was being very inefficient in terms of extensive testing and last touches. In that sense, I still feel the website might not be finished and there could be more minor edits that I will make over time, however, I've felt I've stalled for too long and I think it's appropriate to make the new site live. Let me go over the things that changed.

From an aesthetic point of view, I've made the colours lighter and added some textures, which I think look really nice. As I'm sure you've noticed, the profile picture is gone. I commissioned the art all the way back in 2015, and although it's good, I feel like it's run its course. Thus, the title bar is completely redesigned as a result. Most of the changes, however, are in the functionality of the website, rather than its appearance. Previous iterations of the website struggled with side-by-side elements, which were often broken in older browsers due to an excessive usage of flex and float properties. Believe it or not, searching online for how to create side-by-side elements yields those methods, as opposed to tables, which are much easier to use, and virtually indestructible. Somehow I completely forgot about its existence from my early 2010s HTML years, and I didn't rediscover it until I looked through the source of some Wayback Machine websites. In any case, tables are now the norm on my website, and you'll probably not notice a difference except on older browsers. If you need to test it, the most prominent uses are the Mgea Mna page, and the Fuel Detour Calculator.

Now let's get to the most interesting changes. I have an alternate YouTube channel called Transport Collector which was linked in Projects. Now, it has its own dedicated page featuring locally-hosted video playback of some of the content. It uses the HTML5 video tag and a separate quality selector. The page is programmed mostly using PHP and designed to make it extremely easy (for me) to add new content, while making it functional on all browsers. The quality selector is very simple JavaScript, which works on virtually all implementations. Noscript download links are still available if needed, however. Additionally, the Blog page has also been completely redesigned. The old design was very primitive and difficult to use. It also used the JavaScript pop-up thing that doesn't work well on older browsers. The new page uses absolutely no client-side code, and as such works on all browsers. The design looks a lot more like a proper blog page, and, like Transport Collector, is programmed to be extremely easy to add new content. And more interestingly, there are now categories for blogs! Although right now there aren't any, they are trivial to add and I could write content that is more than just updates. Finally, a few small improvements have been made, such as Mgea Mna's trailer have a quality switch (like on TC), and plenty of other bugfixes and compatibility improvements. The result is a new, awesome website that works even better than it did before, including on even older browsers!

Anyway, I think I mentioned everything that is important. Moving forward, it's really hard for me to predict what I will do. As I said, my motivation is at an all-time low, although there are still game projects that are on the back of my head and I want to begin work on those at some point in the future. As I pointed out, the Blog page is now more flexible and allows new categories, and I really want to actually use this to write other stuff. Whether this will actually happen, I can't promise anything. But that's what I hope for. In any case, that's all for this update. As always, feel free to message me if you have suggestions or problems to report. Thank you to everyone who reads these posts or uses the website in any way whatsoever, I very much appreciate it!