I've been busy with work and out of town and doing other things and whatever other excuses lately, yeah.


I haven't really been paying much attention, so: what needs doing for Platinum? I know the local 'dex has been expanded, there are new sprites, there are a few new alt-forms (which I guess I can officially rename to Formes now), and of course there's a whole new set of locations for me to remember how to rip. Anything else? New move tutor or new sets of moves or whatever?



I originally wrote this code with the intention of making it reusable on other sites, but I never quite figured out how to do that, and some things became really tangled while others became far too ingrained. This is a large part of why things like the forum were never really finished; it hardly seemed worth the effort to work on it very much when only I could possibly use it and this site is rather small to begin with.

Lately I've begun resurrecting the idea of actually splitting everything up, so anyone could run any pieces they want without requiring the others. I would have to go back to the drawing board design-wise, but I could easily reuse a lot of code and ideas, and I think I'm a lot better at design than I was when the oldest of this code was written in the first place anyway.

I'd just be migrating pieces in the background, so it wouldn't have any impact on the Pokedex or whatever meager progress I ever make on it. Once it's worth using I could use it to replace veekun (and eat my own dogfood, so to speak), with the Pokedex being another component that can be included or not.

Worth it?

Just closed fourteen tickets, bringing the total number open down from 133 to 119. Ugh.

Several of them were RBY/GSC data errors, which doesn't surprise me; a lot of that data is from almost a decade ago now, before I expected this to ever be a real project and was copying numbers out of a Prima magazine. Much love to ciencia, who somehow keeps finding them.

Also closed several bugs relating to the breeding chain finder which are now obsoleted by its rewrite. It is, by the way, actually kinda cool now; no more errors, no more churning away for a half-hour, actually does the right thing with both final evolutions and eggs, etc. At least, as far as I've found. Give it a whirl and tell me how I screwed it up this time.

Other things were minor: removed a reference to /style/ from the main page template, fixed a layering issue with the suggestions dropdown, made move-only suggesting work, finally changed the Pokemon search display default to the table instead of a list, and made a couple move effect amendments.



Somewhat related to the lull in news is that, once again, I have decided I really hate my design and have been trying to do it over. I enjoy design, even if I'm not very good at it, and there's not really any better way to practice than to design something. Last time I was shooting for something more relevant than a generic blue and the opportunity to use more than one color, but it fell a bit flat as I discovered that my brown only really matches more brown. This time I have combined the last two approaches, reduced the amount of flat color, fixed some UI problems (like h1 and h2 looking almost the same, header links on the left not looking clickable..), and made the entire scheme a lot cleaner. Here's what I have ended up with:

http://stuff.veekun.com/screenshots/design/veekun5.png

Links are purple because they don't actually go anywhere, so they all count as visited. Normal links are blue but about that dark. There are some hover/focus effects not showing, unfortunately.

I'll probably just give up on IE this time and give them a dumbed-down simple style. Maybe I'll leave them with the brown and give everyone else the option to pick between the two. Not sure yet.

Thoughts?

And I may be partly responsible.

http://lexyeevee.livejournal.com/289857.html

See, this is why you should check veekun. I have the real news. At least when I cause it.


More relevant to veekun, I am not dead; I'm just also working on Ferrox (rewrite of the FurAffinity code) and Perl 6 (newish programming language) and smaller projects and bigger veekun things and $job and oh jesus too much crap. Updates soon, probably. I'll at least knock out a dozen little db bugs or something.