Stormblood [4.0]: Post may contain potential spoilers.
The Swallow’s Compass
I hate myself right now. I was looking at another tab and I went to go to where I was editing this post with the intent to save it. Instead of saving, I misclicked and closed the tab which in turn deleted all of my work. A problem with filebrowser that I will never forget. Atleast Ctrl + S saves the file. I’ll just get into the habit of doing that instead.
Another’s Blog
There are two maing things I wish to talk about today. The first is my discovery of another’s blog that happens to be related towards Final Fantasy XIV. Now I’m fairly confident that there are more out there or use Lodestone’s features to conduct their blogs. However, I find this blog fascinating and disappointed in myself. Its a blog from a person named Kijimuna whom seems to be using Blogger in some fashion. I know very little as to how Blogger functions, but its probably something that I should be using instead of my own personal website. Anyhow, this blog is about of a Lalafell and their Journey throughout Eorzea during 1.0 of FFXIV (and a little bit of A Realm Reborn). It has a very journalistic vibe and is quite intriguing to read a little of it. I can’t say I’ll read all of it since I never experienced that part of the game. Plus it would be difficult for me to look through it based on the fact that the website uses http only and the web design while fine is clearly outdated. Not saying by any means that the blog is bad. I ultimately, don’t find enough interest to read all of it. It might be because I feel more annoyed by how I think their’s blog is better than mine.
The clear differences between our blogs is the approach. To be more specific, their blog is taken in the perspective of a character inside the game. While my blog is taken in the perspective of the author. There isn’t anything wrong with either method. However, I feel that the quality of my blog feels inferior to theirs. The reason being is that when I read some of their posts. I find myself noticing the incompetency of my posts. It makes me realize that in comparison of someone else’s work. The vast majority of my posts feel meaningless. There’s no substance or effort put into them (Let’s be honest the latter part is very true.) While their’s tend to pack far more quality and even flow each post together better than mine. Although, the scope of my blog seems to be a lot larger than their’s.
(Mind you. I mean no ill will towards the person of the other blog. They are simply the first I have seen that has similarities with mine.)
I’ve intended for my blog to be broad in scope, since its meant to be the building blocks for my future ideas and projects. Presently, the main project I’m working on is the Hydaelyn Preservation Project. While various aspects of it are in hiatus (hopefully not forever). My Screenshot a day series is still going strong even with a few mishaps. I attempted at making a story every day and while it hasn’t worked out in the way that I wanted it to. I still think it has potential with a few edges to needed to be refined. The point of all of this, is that I can’t realisticly compare my blog to another that has focused primarily on one idea and that they haven’t updated it in nearly a decade.
Before I proceed further let me link the person’s blog: http://ffxivkijimuna.blogspot.com/ oh yeah here’s the reddit post on where I discovered it https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/11phea2/i_chronicled_all_of_ffxiv_10/
Some nonsense from myself
One last thing to make note of. They don’t make daily posts where as I do. Because of that, I can’t expect myself to make a banger each and every day with this blog. Not only that. They probably had a lot more time to invest in their individual posts where in my boots. I’m sitting here with 10 minutes left to upload a screenshot and make a post before deadline. This post in itself will take an hour or two to make and sometimes I like to invest that time playing games to enjoy the life I have and to not worry about perfection with each post. I don’t even bother with editing these posts the majority of the time since this is blog is meant to be a more of whats on my mind than following some kind of script. I’m not out here telling tips and tricks on how to scam millions of gil of people nor am I doing this for the attention. (Although, it would be nice to see people recognizing my blog in some form or another). This is a very personal blog where its direction wavers on what I want to tell.
Potential plans for this blog
So with that out of the way. I don’t recall going into detail of my current plans with this website as a whole (https://blog.solitem.net/posts/ssadffxiv244/). There are a few reasons on why I want to upgrade the theme’s version and introduce Hugo’s image processing. The main reason is that my current method is a bit unorthodox and prefer to tackle it the “intended” way. Doing so will help the performance of the site and hopefully will make some aspects of it easier. The other reason is that I want to setup the stage of when I finally introduce a flipping gallery to this blog. For a blog that has a bunch of screenshots, yet its an absolute pain to browse said screenshots. By the way, I don’t intend to make it a very simple one huge wall with all of my screenshots. The plan is to introduce a certain level of interactivness to the site that could potentially solve a huge problem with this website. More specifically, a reason for me to properly spread the existence of this blog.
The biggest crux of this blog is that I do very little in terms of spreading it around. The most I have done is link some of my posts to a few discord servers or attach it to the descriptions of my videos. I even have google do its indexing thing as well and yeah… I want to pull this website out of the gutter and want people genuine thoughts on it. I could simply enable comments to this site, but one I don’t want to moderate it and two from what I’ve read. It may cost monthly fees to just have it enabled. Not only that, but I think it would also become an attack vector for tracking. I prefer to lower as many vectors of tracking as possible since I stand against it.
Although, I think linking the youtube videos might become tracking vectors if people were to watch them. I think this theme has a privacy notice for youtube that I should enable.
Let’s get back to the gallery plan. So essentially, the idea is to set a bunch of tags per screenshot and add the coordinates of where the screenshot was taken. That way its location where it was taken can be displayed onto a map. So someone can select which zone they want and be able to sort what type of screenshots from there. Once that has been decided they will be presented a list of pictures that upon clicking/hovering it will display the image to them and pinpoint where on the zone’s map it was taken. I also want to add a dedicated button where people can also download the orignial image since all of the images on the website are going to be processed to a smaller size. The only problem with this whole plan is that I have no experience when it comes to this.
I have enough experience on how to manipulate and alter some aspects of the current website’s theme, but I have very little experience on building something like the gallery from scratch. I plan on implementing a few javascript stuff like Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com/) to the gallery. Although, I like to minimize the usage of javascript where possible. Mind you I’m still in a very early stage with this stuff and I need to do a lot of testing and trial and error to figure some stuff out. Thanfully, Hugo is really handy when it comes to that sort of thing since I can just transfer all of the website server files onto my local machine and build it there nearly identical to how I use the production one right now.
Conclusion
(I tend to do this a lot with these large posts.) I want to mention that its good that someone had made a post of their blog onto the ffxiv subreddit. It hasn’t been taken down by the moderators which means my concerns of me making a post about this blog has been slightly alleviated. I’m still concern, since my posts aren’t 100% about FFXIV, but it should be fine for aslong I use a post that is clearly related to it.
So yeah thats today’s post. I hope you folks have enjoyed it to some extent and hopefully I can get some of these projects out of the ground.