I figure if I can't think of anything else I'm happy to post a blog entry about, I might as well blog about website stuff.

I don't really know what SSGs are or how they work, but I suspect this is the sort of thing they're good for? Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, this is adapted from knowledge acquired from - where else could it be? - Neopets! For tilesetting. I might blog about Neopets; there's lots of interesting little things about Neopets that only people who actually use Neopets know about. I think from the outside it's basically impossible to tell that Neopets was really big - big enough to sustain a lot of Neopets-specific subcultures and social ecosystems! I think everybody knows about 999 draiks or black market neopoint money laundering, but it seems like the main thing people in general know about Neopets is that it was at one point owned by a parent company run by Scientologists. I think my next big project once I've set up the textbook art gallery is going to be a Neopets fansite! I've been scraping a lot of buttons and saving a lot of petpages; I think I want to make an archive of Neopets tutorials, layouts, buttons, etc. Since Neopets is excluded from the wayback machine, there's a lot of internet history at risk of permanent erasure - a lot of it's already been withering, with the purging and death of various image hosting platforms like tinypic and photobucket.

...Well, anyway, that's not what this post is about, this post is about spreadsheets.

I am confident that this is not the best way to do this; it is, however, the way I know how to do it, so it is the way I'm doing it. In general, I think this is a great way to make things. Perfect is the enemy of good, and good is the enemy of done! If it works, it works. If it only kinda works - well, if you don't care, then there's nothing to worry about, so either fix it or decide you don't care. I think it's great to do things poorly. I tend to get really paralyzed and scared and stuck on projects and become completely overwhelmed by my own lack of skill or potential mistakes and do nothing at all, so I am a big fan of doing a bad job and making crap websites. Doing anything at all is a really big accomplishment for me! All that to say, I am not asking for help or advice, am not interested in receiving any until I do actually ask for it.

For stuff like my backgrounds page, my bookmarks list, and now this textbook gallery, I use Google Sheets for putting together the HTML! For 2 reasons: the "concatenate" function and the ability to click and drag things to make a sequence.

So I can set this up:

ABCDE
<img src="image1.jpg">=CONCATENATE(A1:D1)

The =CONCATENATE function just combines the specified cells together in the order you specify. It will display as A1B1C1D1 - or, in this case, as <img src="image1.jpg">. Super handy for HTML.

Then I just drag it all down to fill as many rows as I need. Google Sheets loves to count! It'll fill in the cells as appropriate - <img src=" gets copied all the way down, image1 advances to image2 and image3 and etc, and the concatenate formula is counted up accordingly as well to =CONCATENATE(A2:D2), =CONCATENATE(A3:D3), et cetera.

Then I can just copy the concatenated code and paste it into vscode! (I use my image viewer program, IrfanView, to bulk rename things to give them sequenced names - background1, background2, etc.) Much easier than manually typing out all 400 img srcs; also easier than copy-pasting and editing. It's very tidy. The image extension I have in its own column to make switching to .gif or .png as easy as possible, because I'm pretty lazy and also because an extra backspace or click really adds up when you're doing several hundred things.

For the textbook gallery, every image has a popover; this would be a HUGE pain in the ass without the spreadsheet.

The concatenate here is =CONCATENATE(A1:G1,B1,H1,D1,I1,J1). I keep most of the columns hidden and highlighted the columns I actually edit so I don't confuse myself, since this looks like a bunch of nonsense.

Textbook files have not been batch-renamed because they're organized into subsubfolders and I've been moving them around a lot. So I am manually typing in the file name and the alt text (just the title of the book and the author, not full descriptions of each piece of art).

It's still pretty slow, since I'm doing the gallery so that each page is only about 5 to 10 images. Lots of copying and pasting. Also, google sheets is being nasty and inserting a bunch of extra quotation marks into the copy-pasted code, so I have to delete those. Fie, hell's bells, most hateful, and such. It's pretty repetitive in a way that I suspect some type of code would be able to make more efficient; alas and alack, I am victim to my ignorance and pride! I shan't surrender to the siren song of convenience, because I do not have any desire to smash my boat on the deadly rocks of Learning A Difficult New Thing.

I currently have 61 out of 75 pages done, so work is proceeding apace! It should be finished by the end of the month, although I'm in the middle of a pretty bad Mental Illness Episode so it could end up taking any amount of time at all. Perhaps a few years! Who knows? Not me. The quiz is finished, as is the about page - which includes a little tutorial on how to save images from copy-protected books on the Internet Archive!

Really, I'd be finished sooner if I didn't keep getting distracted rummaging for more images; I'm determined to finish the first batch and get the site uploaded before I process the new saved covers, at least, but that doesn't stop me from doing some cheeky wandering and saving stuff. One thing that's not going up in this first round but will be up later is "special collections" - pages for displaying trends in cover art that I find amusing/interesting but are not necessarily nice to look at or really fit with the rest of the collection.

For example I arbitarily decided to avoid covers that are just photographs/collections of photographs; there's a few with photographic elements, but I wanted to stick to primarily illustrations and designs. But! There's some interesting trends in those covers sometimes. The three special collections I have planned so far are "Wet Algebra", "Evil School For Villains", and probably a collection about the extremely specific racism of anthropology textbook covers!

I'm really enjoying this project, both because of and in spite of the tedium. It's tedious in the way I enjoy! I really like collecting things, organizing things, and making a little spreadsheet. And I like looking at lots and lots of pictures.

Currently the way it's arranged is by subject first, and then individual rooms (mostly) have images with similar vibes or colors or shapes. I would like to add another way to browse where the images are grouped by visual themes across subjects, but that would be a lot of extra work! Maybe that's what PHP is for. I dunno. I still don't know what PHP is.

The big dream that I would love to do but is actually impossible and wildly out of scope is have a way for people to draw connections between images on different pages and make their own collections showcasing themes or trends they've noticed... I don't even know what code language that would require, haha. A complicated mixture of things that would require a fundamentally different structure and type of website, for a start! Maybe if I'd decided to make a wiki instead... Oh, well. It's something that would be kind of neat, but not worth learning anything new for; people have the ability to make connections pre-installed in their heads, after all! They can simply think about it.

...I say that, but I don't imagine there will be a whole lot of people visiting! It's pretty niche, even within the already-small niche of Hobby Websites. Fortunately, I do not care if nobody ever looks at it, since collecting and organizing pictures is just a fun thing to do. I highly recommend making a gallery collection of some kind. A website can be a pinterest board or an aesthetic tumblr designed by you to your own preferences and without any ads or logins.

Ah... that reminds me, maybe I should port my Cool Wizard Pics collection from cohost to my website... I probably have the space for that. Maybe I should move the public domain hoard to its own site, since it takes up so much space... maybe I should just bite the bullet and get Neocities premium, but I'm hesitant because I always see people saying it's not a good deal for the money but never saying what's a better deal? And a lot of the paid hosting options I've seen that are at that price point are way worse actually. I dunno. I think Nekoweb's premium is basically the same but a bit cheaper... I hate paying for stuff, though. Especially when I could just figure out a way to do it for free. But I like having my website all in one place... boo hoo.

Well, if you didn't know about =CONCATENATE, now you do. It's really useful. It's the only spreadsheet function/formula/whatever I know, but I use it a lot. You can probably use it on things that aren't googledocs, although I wouldn't know; I've tried using LibreOffice's sheets program but it seemed SUPER slow and the interface was so different from google's that I just couldn't figure it out.

Unrelated: note to self to buy the Sinners DVD (or bluray), it's out now.