I love me a good prompt list as a substitute for actually working on stuff. Here's one with a million questions. You, too, can answer a million questions by copying 100webmaster.txt!

I haven't posted any new coding projects in a very long time, but I've been gradually chipping away at a concept that longtime readers will know by its working (joke) title of "Walmart Toyhouse," from the character management website Toyhouse. In theory, Walmart Toyhouse is a self-hosted character management script with enough automation that it's easy to maintain without being unnecessarily dense or hard to customize. I say "in theory" because progress on the code stalled for a while.

For me, the ideal character management system needs the following components:

• All information is pulled from a central database
• Page templates that you can reuse and reformat for multiple characters
• Some form of organization (folders)
• Galleries auto-populate from one central image database

It's not a complex idea on paper, but I didn't make much progress on it because I got stuck on implementing stuff like custom fields into a database. I also thought I had to code a browser interface for the whole thing, and that's a can of worms that I didn't have the energy to open (especially for a project with this many moving parts). So Walmart Toyhouse has been languishing in development hell for a very long time.

Cut to December 2024. I saw a post from Armaina floating the idea of a PHP and CSV character repository, and it singlehandedly solved nearly every problem I was having with my original conception of this code.

I found a fun prompt list of blog questions from Leilukin and Starbreaker (completely independent of each other, as it happens). Nobody asked me for my opinion, but here I am anyway!

Anyone who has been in "small web" spaces has probably heard of the Yesterweb. It seemed like everyone was in their webring (some people still have the defunct widget up, even), and supposedly they were very active in proseltyzing on social media because there's a cutesy infographic page on their website.

I thought the Yesterweb was really annoying, and I didn't agree with what they were on about. Ultimately, though, I thought they were just a harmless clique that I happened to find obnoxious, so I didn't really care.

When I saw they shut down and left a very long postmortem to remember them by, I decided to give the thing a read because I was expecting silly petty internet drama. I love internet drama! And then I ended up getting significantly more than I had mentally prepared myself for. The following is more or less a text version of a stupid Youtube reaction video, so sorry* if you were expecting an eloquent takedown or something.

Image gallery frameworks! They're everywhere! And yet I haven't found even one that doesn't suck. They're clunky at best and inaccessible at worst.

Here is a sampler of issues I've encountered on various image galleries:

• Requires Javascript to work (clunky, inaccessible)
• Doesn't have alt text (inaccessible)
• Lightboxes (clunky, usually inaccessible, probably requires Javascript)
• Just a bunch of thumbnails that link to image files (inaccessible)
• Images open in a tooltip (worse than lightboxes in every conceivable way)

There must be a better way. Right???