Blog site has been updated! ✨

I've been a lil absent for the last week or so, and that is because I completely revamped my blog site: https://welcometoheavenblog.net :D

In my last devlog, I discussed how I had a few things I needed to finish before starting work on Soft Drop again. Step 1 was redoing my site to make it easier to update with all the things I'm working on (public art, Are We Engaged?, and soon Soft Drop). Before, I basically just had a bunch of HTML pages I had thrown into a parent folder and was linking to them, but the code was messy, and it was hard to navigate, etc. Worst of all was the Soft Drop website code...which...ok, there was a LOT wrong with it. I'll try to explain.
So, on every page of Soft Drop (over 50 pages) I want to have the same footer, header, etc. but I also want every page to update if I want to make a change to the footer or header instead of having to edit all the headers and footers on all the pages. Makes sense, right? This is something React excels at, but not something HTML/CSS/JS sites excel at, but I tried to make it work through some ungodly code and was basically injecting an HTML file into an HTML file:

which is like...bad and can mess with how your site is seen by search engines and more. I should just use React, ya'know? So that's what I did! I've done some editing of React websites in the past, but I didn't really understand how to set up React websites or like how components and stuff work. The way I learn the best is by just trying to make something and looking up how to do specific things until I finish the project (brute force). It went about like this:

Yep! I'm not a React expert by far, but I get the basics now, and I was able to make my site, which is really what I wanted it for. There are still some quality of life things I want to add to the site later, such as:

• Comment sections on Soft Drop and Are We Engaged

• Save and load place buttons on Soft Drop and Are We Engaged

• RSS feed (?) (some of ya'll know about my long history of RSS troubles on my blog site, lol)

• Learn more about generating paths from useStates (?)

• Maybe change how Soft Drop chapters are set up so that they are each a page instead of importing their content into one page if I cannot figure out the generating paths thing

But uhhh, yeah! :D That was fun and also extremely not fun all at once. But the result definitely made it all worth it for me; it's also just so much cleaner code-wise, the site looks more unified, and it's more efficient. Okay, now on to step 2 of my plan: planning how Soft Drop will continue in conjunction with Are We Engaged? 💪 Speaking of which, I'll start adding early access chapters of AWE? soon, I just need to make myself a bit of a chapter buffer first (so that in case I miss a week or so, there is still content to post).

Also, please let me know if you see anything not working as intended! Making websites is a little frustrating because, for example, here is the same version of the site on Safari vs Firefox...

Have a great rest of the week! 😊🌈