Touhou-Project.com

Best way forward

Hey all, hope you’ve been well. I wanted to take a moment to talk about what I’ve been up to since the last post. Feel free to skip the rest of this explanation with an assurance that I have been busy albeit without much to show for it.

The general objectives of what I’m working for falls in two broad categories: 1) enhancements, new features and rehauls of user-facing stuff and 2) ...

The Road Goes Ever On

Hey all, hope you’ve been doing well. In the two or so weeks since I’ve last posted one of these, I’ve been at work continuing to expand the management side of the site. And there’s good news to share.

As you may recall, I had been working on changing how user privileges worked and how a bunch of backend stuff responded to more granular permissions. Keeping track of what users do ...

Custodial Rights

Hey all, hope you’ve been well. I’ve been busy in the past few weeks and, as of the time of posting this, have already rolled out a good deal of what I’ve been working on.

In my previous post I offered some broad strokes about what I was doing and this time around I want to talk about the behind-the-scenes kinds of things that I had to do to overhaul the moderation/staff system. Thi...

Taking account(s)

Hey all, it’s been a while since I’ve shared what I’ve been up to. I can report that I’ve let the THP spirit have reign free and have spread myself thin on various projects. So I haven’t managed to finish any of them yet but have gained a few interesting insights. I thought I might share some of them today.

First and foremost, I’ve been working on a little side thing that does...

Phoenix-hot takes

Hey all, hope you’re well. I’ve been working on some stuff on and off since the last time I posted but I’ll have more on that in the coming weeks. For now, I wanted to get back to answering the questions that some of you posed. I thought long and hard about which were the most interesting but, in a typical bout of THP indecision™, I couldn’t make up my mind. So, instead, I’ve opted ...

Opinions Solicited

Hey all, hope you're doing well. As I said in the last post, I've been taking a while to figure out how to proceed with the next bits of code that I'll be working on. In the meantime, since I don't really have a ready topic, I thought that it would be nice to ask you all what you would like me to write about for my next post. 

I thought about putting a poll that you could vote on but...

Wait, there's feeds? What's a feed?

Hey all, hope you’ve had a good start to the year. While it’s been somewhat quiet for THP as of late, I’ve been able to spend some time working on the site’s code.

I was tempted to title this post something appropriately self-depreciating because the vast majority of what I got done probably only really matters to me or a lunatic few; tweaks here and there to the site’s appearan...

Thats's a Wrap!

Hey all, hope you’re doing well as this very long year finally wraps up. I have a few goodies to announce this time around. While the end-of-year period has been especially busy for me, I’ve still managed to get some work done on the site.

Let’s get the most complex feature out of the way: post editing. Yes, I hear you, anathema to an imageboard. But we’re not exactly a b...

November Update

Hey all, hope you’re doing well. Yesterday I rolled out a bunch of new stuff for THP and it seemed to go mostly well, with only small things needing fixes in the hours after.

There’s a lot here that ought to provide a better user experience. First and foremost, the settings menu got a little overhaul with collapsible categories and a few new options there. You can expect to find a qui...

Type of hat with a 'tcha'

Hey all, hope you’ve been well. I’ll be talking this time around about something rather pointless (and a little spooky) that I’ve had to work on. Sounds silly? Yes, well, the internet is a silly place.

I’m talking, of course about catpcha. If you’re unaware of what that is: bless your charmed life. But basically it’s the name of an implementation of a challenge-response system...

Shikigami tails work in parallel

Hey all, hope you’re doing alright. While there’s a lot on the horizon to come, I thought that I’d talk about some of the other work I was doing in parallel to the story list overhaul and other things completed since.

Let’s start with a nice quality-of-life improvement. If you’ve ever browsed especially old, archived, threads on a phone or similar you may have noticed that they ...

Story List Overhaul

After a whole lot of work and effort, the first phase of the story list overhaul is now finally complete. Thank you to all the patrons that helped provide the resources to make it possible. Check out the changes for yourself 

Self-management

Hey all, hope you’ve been doing well!  

Before jumping into today’s topic, I wanted to announce that I’m close to rolling out the changes to the story list. I froze development of new features and the general scope about a week or two ago. This means that the rest of my dev time involves polishing up things, making sure there’s no breakage and optimizations. It may not sound ...

The Searchers

Hey all, hope you’ve been doing well. We continue to look at the upcoming story list changes, this time focusing on how searching works.  

At its most basic, searching for something tends not to be too hard in programs. There are usually many tools, filters and other in-built functions in higher-level languages and frameworks. It only gets tricky when you have multiple queries goin...

Tags, you’re it!

Hey all, hope you’re doing alright. As promised, I’ll be talking about the tag system and how it pertains to the story list this time around.  

In order to have a dynamic number of tags for a variable amount of stories, inputting data in a relational database is an obvious starting point. That tags ought to be their own table, with a column for a unique id at another with a human...

Match Three

Hey guys, hope you’re doing alright. Instead of setting it up, I’ll let this GIF do the talking for me:

Now you may be thinking, “Hey, autocompleted suggestions isn’t a topic worth talking about. I’ve seen it on plenty of sites.” Yeah, sure, it’s common enough. But just because it�...

As it may well look

Hey guys, hope you’re doing well!

Last time I wrote one of these, I said it would be the first of a multi-part look at the storylist overhaul. Predictably, it took me longer to get to writing this as June proved to be a busy month for me. Still, I think you’ll like what you’ll see in this short preview.  

Let’s start with a screenshot of what the new list looks on my te...

The story list as it exists

Hey guys, hope you’re well. As promised, we’ll be talking about the story list this time around. I’m going to try something slightly different and split all of this up into shorter posts spread out over time, in the hopes that we don’t get too dense and boring!

I’ve talked about in the past about some of ...

Optimized Consistency

In the last one of these I said I would be working on the story list. I lied. Sort of. I’ll have more on that in a week or two but for now I wanted to talk about some other optimizations I’ve been up to.  

Over the past year especially, I’ve tried to make THP more responsive and more uniform no matter what device you’re browsing from. This has resulted in restructuring old co...

Leveling and Less Bloat

Hey, hope you’re well and keeping sane if you’re quarantined. I’ll be talking about some of the things I’ve done since the last time I posted. For sake of convenience, we can broadly divide them up into three categories.

The first of these categories is the work done to integrate the mobile site to base code. Previously, a special library would check if the user agent of a device ...

Appearances aren’t everything

Hey guys. Hope you and those important to you are doing well during this pandemic. I’m overdue on a writeup on the stuff that’s been going on with the site so I’ve finally decided to get around to it.

You may have noticed that last month I rolled out some changes to how the site looks. The main feature is a appearance menu in the settings that allows users to customize the appearanc...

Fundamentally Fundamentals

Hey all, hope you’re doing well. I’ve been busy since the last time I wrote up one of these. Both the second half of January and first half of February saw me do a lot of necessary work on the site. I took a little break around mid month but have since gotten back in the saddle and I wanted to keep you abreast of what’s been going on and what to expect soon.

Simplicity is el...