Thousand Roads

A Pokémon fansite dedicated to the creative side of the Pokémon fandom, especially fanfiction.

November Updates

Last Updated December 03 2015

Two big updates for the month of November! It's... no longer November, in fact, and I should be much less lazy about updating the front page, since I've definitely made a fair number of changes since August.

First, I put together some custom NaNoWriMo word widgets called "NaNoWriMon" because I love horrible puns. I did NaNoWriMo myself, as always, so I can actually show my own off:

Negrek's NaNoWriMon

I've been trying to get these guys out for literal years now, and came pretty close in 2014 despite having to put things on hold in order to participate in Mewitti's contest. It's great that I can finally kick this idea out of the nest and move on to something else. It's probably worth noting that NaNoWriMon don't actually do anything at the moment, since it's December and NaNo isn't in progress, but they'll be back in action next November, and possibly for Camp NaNo as well, although I'm not as familiar with those events and not totally sure at the moment.

The other addition you can actually enjoy right this very second is the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon personality test, which I hammered out in anticipation of Super Mystery Dungeon's release. There are twenty-four different results, and this is mine:

I am Torchic!

I'm really proud of the coding behind this one; it's all dynamically generated from a JSON file on the backend, so if I want to make another personality test, all I need to do is copy the backend code into a new directory, change the questions and point values in the JSON file, add the appropriate images, and it's ready to go! I... don't actually have any other quizzes in mind at the moment, but the barrier to entry's pretty low if I decide to throw one together on a whim in the future. Let me know if there's one you're dying to see. :P

I also did a bit of work on the comment system, fixing some bugs and making it possible to comment on individual pages in addition to commenting on news posts. The guestbook itself will remain as a kind of "news feed" recording comments from all sources in one place. Big thanks to Butterfree for her help getting the kinks worked out, and my apologies to anybody who had trouble with the script before I squashed the bugs. (Also, it's not currently possible to comment on either the personality quiz or the NaNoWriMon, but I'll be working those pages into the system soon, too.)

December's going to be a pretty quiet month while I regroup after NaNo and work on editing, but I do have one page in mind that I'm going to work on wrapping up, since I'd like to be able to make updating it a yearly tradition. I'm also probably going to do another backend rewrite over Christmas vaction, same as I did last year. Part of that may be a new layout, as I've got an idea I like and want to try making a truly mobile-friendly style; the current one at least makes gestures in that direction, but I definitely designed the desktop-resolution style first and clumsily bolted on some degraded versions for mobile support. This time I'll try building from the smallest sizes up so they aren't last-minute afterthoughts.

I think that's enough to keep me busy for the next month or so. Hope you enjoy the new content; there's more coming soon!

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