#blinkiedev

[glitt3rgeist]

:( <== me when pixel art gets automatically resized to a non integer multiple of the original

[graphics-cafe]

i’m working on something new: a Blinkie Transcription Project to archive & transcribe blinkies from Geocities!

basically i have a big folder of over 6000 blinkies which i got from GifCities. i want to make a searchable database of blinkies: you could type some text and see all the blinkies with that text, and click on any of them to visit the page they were archived from!

6000 blinkies is A Lot to transcribe, so i could really use some help. i made a spreadsheet so anyone can contribute a transcription!! volunteer transcribers will be credited & linked when the project is complete. i really appreciate any help, even if it’s just one or two blinkies!! this is also a fun way to unearth some old web treasures that might have been buried in the Internet Archive for decades :D

thank you <3<3<3

[graphics-cafe]

finally added a little symbol selector to blinkies.cafe!!

[graphics-cafe]

there are some really talented people pushing blinkies forward as a medium and it's so exciting to watch

[graphics-cafe]

another update!! each blinkie in the blinkie feed now links to its template! also, you can copy & share links to specific templates ^^

[graphics-cafe]

no more need for /emote codes on blinkies.cafe!!! you can now input symbols directly into the text box <3

[graphics-cafe]

blinkies.cafe is a deeply anachronistic website: it's dedicated to an art form that peaked in popularity 20 years ago, but it's built using very modern technologies that no-one even dreamt of back then

[graphics-cafe]

just added a live feed of recently generated blinkies!

[graphics-cafe]

does anyone actually use the style selector dropdown on blinkies.cafe? i'm thinking of replacing it with something else :3c

[graphics-cafe]

fun fact about running a website: there is always a constant stream of hacker bots that just crawl the web, trying to log in to every website they can find using default/common usernames & passwords!

they don't really know what to do with blinkies.cafe -- it's not structured like your typical Wordpress site, and there isn't even a login page. but it doesn't stop them from trying :P

[graphics-cafe]

[graphics-cafe]

can we submit graphics (like textless blinkies that we’ve made) to possibly be added to blinkies.cafe?

unfortunately i'm not currently taking submissions to blinkies.cafe,,,, but i want to change that and tbh i've been thinking about it from the start!! i have a WIP or two lying around (details under cut) to try to take a crack at it.

thank you so so much for your interest tho!!!!! i would love to see your templates!!! if you post them in the #blinkies tag (& maybe #blinkie templates) i bet people could get a lot of use out of them ^^

and when i iron out some wrinkles (details under cut) i'd love to add more submissions to blinkies.cafe <3

yeah so i've been thinking about this since the earliest days of blinkies.cafe. currently i have some obstacles.

manual work

at the moment, i personally have to add every new template to the generator. there's a bunch of manual work involved: choosing font, font colour, default text, text positioning, etc. it takes a bunch of trial and error to see what looks good.

when an artist submits a blinkie template, i want to make sure they're happy with the result. so it's a back-and-forth collaborative process. it takes a bit of technical knowledge on the part of the artist as well, to know what sorts of things i can & can't do.

i should streamline this process.

in the meantime, i'm already at capacity with adding templates >< i love doing it - it's like "comfort work" for me - but i also have a full-time job and chronic fatigue and chores and adhd, and a lot of the time i just don't have much time and/or energy to spare.

credits & licensing

if i'm gonna start accepting submissions from a bunch of different people, i need to draft like a "terms & conditions" statement for submitting.

basically to say, "by submitting your template, you agree to let me use it for X & release it under Y license. people will be able to make your blinkie say things, and i'm not responsible for what they say. here's how you'll be credited" kinda thing.

but idk much about art licensing and i know even less about writing legal text

also, different artists might have different opinions on how they want to be credited. the easiest thing for me to do would be to have the artist link pop up after you generate a blinkie and add it in the archive of sources. i'd say that in the terms & conditions, but ppl might want to be credited in a different way, and i can't have like a custom crediting method for each submission.

possible solution

one of my thousands of wips (thanks adhd) is a blinkie generator that runs entirely in the browser. if i can get around to polishing it up, i'll put it on blinkies.cafe, and you could embed it in your Neocities or even your tumblr theme.

basically you'd upload your template somewhere (tumblr, imgur, deviantart, whatever) as PNG frames, then you'd paste their URLs, select a font, type your text, and generate a blinkie!

it'd also give you a URL for your own personal blinkie maker, so you could post a link and other people could use it too ^^

this would be a lot easier for me to maintain because i wouldn't have to moderate or manually add templates at all!!

it'd also make it possible for anyone to run their own personal blinkie maker with their own templates, and host it on Tumblr or Neocities or anywhere else that lets you embed scripts :3

downsides to this are that A) browser-based gif generation might not work on all browsers or on older hardware, and B) personal templates wouldn't get the visibility of being on the main blinkies.cafe gallery.

lmk if that sounds interesting to u

[graphics-cafe]

blinkies.cafe supports /heart ♥️, /dia ♦️, /club ♣️, and /spade ♠️

it's actually not a homestuck thing, i was just lucky enough to find a bitmap font that has them (along with a lot of languages)

who knows if it was a homestuck thing for them though

[graphics-cafe]

what does the back of the blinkies searcher look like? like, how is all the data stored, and how does the site take a search input and filter the blinkies to it?

good question!! i'll try my best to explain the data structure used by the Geoblinkies search engine.

first, imagine a list of blinkies, like this but 6,000 long:

for each blinkie we need the list to contain certain information:

url of .gif file on blinkies.neocities.org

transcript (text & image descriptions)

source url of archived Geocities page

transcriber name for credit

so we make each item in the list an "object", each with specific "fields" with standard names, containing the important data like this:

note: in the actual code, the property names are different -- instead of "gifurl" it's "name", instead of "source" it's "page".

the list is sent to your browser whenever you visit Geoblinkies!

so let's say you type "titty" into the search bar and press "search!"

the page contains some poorly written (sorry) javascript code which clears the page then loops through every blinkie object in the list and checks whether its transcript contains "titty" (not case-sensitive).

so in our example, it would start at the top and look at the data for Blinkie 0. it'd check the transcript and see that it doesn't contain "titty", and then move on to Blinkie 1. it'd read Blinkie 1's transcript, which does contain "titty" so we have a match!

For each match:

add an image element to the page's HTML

set the img src = gifurl to add the blinkie to the page

add a click event listener which tells the page to do something if the image is clicked: a) update the source link at the top of the page to point at the source url (a href = source) b) update the transcriber link with the correct transcriber name

that's just about it! for more details feel free to look through the page source (F12 by default)

note -- i'm self-taught, i've never "properly" learned object-oriented programming, and this is my first time coding a search engine. i'm sure there's a better way to do it (lmk if you have tips!). this method will run into problems if a lot more blinkies are added -- it'll get slow on less powerful hardware. but i think it'll be fine at least for several thousand more blinkies, and if Geoblinkies grows that much there'll be other things to worry about like bandwidth and storage ^^;

scalability is always at the back of my mind for projects like this and especially bc. at some point i have to actually read a book, research a bit, and possibly spend some more money ><

[graphics-cafe]

Litany Against Feature Creep

I must not feature-creep.

Features are the mind-killer. 

Features are the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my features.

I will permit them to pass over me and through me.

And when they have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see their path.

Where the features have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

[graphics-cafe]

working on image processing code is honestly so fulfilling to me

like,, i can make pretty things?? by being a computer nerd???? whoa