#fujoshis guide to web development

[ushas42]

@fujowebdev

[fujocoded]

Are you a writer?

Are you in one—or many!—niche online communities? Do you want to helps us build a better web for our own community (fanworks fandom), help yours in the process, and get some money 💵🏧💰 in return?

FujoCoded is looking for all kinds of writers! Drop your contacts in our form ⬇️

As a reminder, FujoCoded LLC works to bring internet weirdos together and to empower niche communities to reclaim their online spaces! Help us help the web by lending us your talents ⬆️ our supporting our work on Patreon ⬅️!

[fujowebdev]

✨(G)IT'S DELIVERY DAY✨

The first issue of the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development has been drafted, edited, alpha-read, beta-read, possibly even omega-read—and starting today, it'll be backer-read!

After 18 months' work, the digital preview hit our backers' inboxes this morning.

As you can imagine, A LOT of work from A LOT of incredibly talented people went into making this day possible.

Our mission was not easy: creating an approachable and engaging learning experience for beginners with a technology as complex as Git? "Impossible!", many would say.

And yet, according to our beta readers, we succeeded in doing just that. So it's time for the penultimate test: put the digital preview in the hands of a slightly-broader public and find out if our backers agree with our betas!

As you can imagine, we're scared but excited 🫣

Thanking everyone who participated in this issue would fill the whole tweet, so here's the zine credits in the pics👇, featuring @essential-randomness, @enigmalea, @starfieldcanvas, @ymkse, @elendraug, @doubledeadstudio, @ikam177, @sgt-spank, @tarantasina, @a-brilliant-loser, @mappapapa and beyond!

Remember to sign up for our newsletter on to follow along with our progress, or sign up at the bottom of our site to get notified when Issue 1 is available to the general public!

And you can always get updates by following us here!

[sgt-spank]

Hey there, I’m Sgt, and I’m the artist who brought ARIA to life in this project.

I joined the #Fujoguide project out of love for the idea of bringing Queer content creators together for a chance to make something fun and educational for people to better curate their own online spaces and experiences. Ms Boba’s drive for coming up with unique and interesting ideas is an exceptional talent, and I looked forward to working on a project that can help folks that struggle with textbook-style guides to have a better grasp on coding so that we don’t have to settle for the platforms created by social media bigwigs with pockets deeper than the Mariana trench.

This was a brand new experience for me, as this was the first time I ever had a chance to participate in a project quite this big with so many other wonderful creators who share the same goal. I’m a very visual learner, as are many people, and I feel like this project is such a good way to get folks like me engaged and focused on learning to code and create our own little personal corners of the web where we don’t have to follow anybody else’s rules. Not only that, but I was absolutely tickled to participate in something involving a lot of queer representation with a team of fellow queer folks from many walks of life.

The care and love that went into this project—and that will continue to be poured into this project—is so special, and I’m so happy to be a part of it. We have so many things still in the works, and we can’t wait to share more of our passion project with you.

Also, have you seen the gorgeous men? Absolutely incredible. All of them are hotties. Can you guess who my favorite is?

[starfieldcanvas]

FUCK YEAH HERE IT COMESSSSS

I can't believe this is real and I'm physically holding it

(digital preview of @fujowebdev Issue 1 is shipping soon to our Kickstarter supporters 👀 )

[dawnfelagund]

I normally actively avoid posting about anything where money is attached. I'm making an exception here for a project that addresses what I see as a significant (and growing) need in the fandom.

I (along with a team of incredible comods) run an independent archive, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. We are one of the only independent archives left, at least in the Tolkien fandom.

We wage a lot of uphill battles to keep our archive open and active, but one of the biggest is the tech side. I'm not an IT pro; I'm a middle-school humanities teacher. I began learning the tech skills to run an archive in 2006 and have been learning ever since. By now, I've devoted hundreds if not thousands of hours to learning how to build and run websites. And it's hard, mostly because it is hard to find information that is written at a level comprehensible by an exhausted middle-school teacher who has a half-hour at the end of her day to puzzle something out. Documentation generally sucks; tutorials often seem to be written at a level just above where I am. My knowledge has a lot of holes as a result, and I sometimes have to give up on something because I can't find what I need to teach me to do it.

The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development is a Kickstarter project that aims to remedy that by producing materials aimed at teaching web development concepts specifically to a fannish audience and with the goal of supporting an independent fannish web, where fans have the know-how to build their own sites, archives, and other web projects. They are very close to their goal. I made my donation today; I'm hoping we might push them over the finish line.

Currently, fans are primarily tethered to a few large sites used for fandom purposes. Some of these are benevolent and trustworthy (AO3, for example); others are not and have taken damaging steps toward fandom over the years (not mentioning any names here ...) All of them have their limitations. The primary complaints I hear about AO3, for example, have nothing to do with AO3 doing anything wrong and everything to do with people wanting AO3 to be something other than AO3. At the same time, I get it: We are at the point where AO3 is often the only choice for many creators to archive their work and the only choice for people who want to enjoy fanworks. Those people are understandably upset when AO3 can't meet their needs because they don't see themselves as having another choice.

But it didn't used to be this way. It used to be (at least in Tolkien fandom) that if you wanted something that didn't exist, you built it yourself. This is how the SWG came to be: some of us wanted an archive just for Silmfic, there wasn't one, so we built one. We weren't alone in this, and we felt empowered because so many other fans were doing the same thing: learning together and teaching and supporting each other as we went. This was when "building a website" meant learning enough HTML and CSS to hand-markup a page or adjust an eFiction theme.

But, as time passed and the internet evolved, our enthusiastically acquired knowledge of HTML wasn't enough to keep afloat sites that were breaking at a much deeper level, and those sites began to disappear. My comods and I did endeavor to gain the knowledge to save our decaying archive and, as noted above, it was not easy, and I do not blame anyone for not doing the same. It was a part-time job for me for over a year, and I'm lucky that I was able to make room for it in my life. It's unreasonable to expect that everyone will be able to do that.

The increasing consolidation and corporatization of fandom is a problem too. We've seen time and again that for-profit companies don't have our interests in mind. All of the fannish stuff we love on Tumblr and Discord and FanFiction.net could be gone tomorrow and for no better reason than someone will make a little more profit if our embarrassing fandom garbage is not there. It's happened before, many times. Even without corporate malevolence, digital data is fragile and having everything in just one place is perilous. While I'm sure AO3, for example, is diligent in preserving our work as best as possible, data losses and breaches do happen all the time.

It used to be that Tolkien fanfic writers would archive their work in three, four, more different places. If one had a data loss, that sucked, but mostly because you lost comments, not because entire swaths of fanworks were gone forever. That level of crossposting is no longer an option.

It used to be that Tolkien fanfic writers would archive their work in three, four, more different places. If one had a data loss, that sucked, but mostly because you lost comments, not because entire swaths of fanworks were gone forever. That level of crossposting is no longer an option.

[enigmalea]

Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

[holyscream]

[ROBOT VOICE] WELCOME TO VERSION CONTROL

It’s already the 7th where I live, so

Happy 10010th Birthday, Git! I don’t use you as much as I should anymore (or… at all, currently 🙇🏽) and I would like to change that this year. Let’s make it happen!

the fujoshi guide to web development: kickstarter · @fujowebdev

[starfieldcanvas]

Here is a basic startup guide to using Terminal, written specifically for fandom people who aren't any more computery than they have to be to navigate ao3 and social media!

This guide was created as a free resource attached to the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development, which reimagines web development tools as cute anime guys. If you aren't already familiar, go check it out at @fujowebdev , or follow the guide's parent company @fujocoded for future free resources.

I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Fuckers.

[mappapapa]

Sketches of Terminal, a character I designed that is appearing in the very real April 1st surprise project The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. Learn more about what this entails on @fujowebdev and consider supporting the project on Kickstarter!

[chemicalcain]

i have been thinking so so much about the fujoshi guide to web development. i cannot get catboy git out of my head. unfortunately this has manifested as a desire to bully him, so i drew him getting neutered! HOPE YOU ENJOY @fujowebdev

bonus:

[mizunotic]

As you might have guessed from my many recent reblogs, I'm a part of The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development Kickstarter. I want to say some stuff about it because I believe in it and love it so much.

I'm a big believer in Ms. Boba and BobaBoard, and when she told me her April Fools plans for 2023, I practically vibrated with excitement. Building fan sites was a hobby when I was a kid, and I had recently gotten back into it thanks to the rise of interest in the "old web". And the idea of being taught by ikemen who wanted to kiss each other was just the cherry on top. I've watched this project come together due to the work of so many amazing volunteers who love and care about BL and queer representation, and I'm so excited to see it released into the world. I hope our backers find it as useful, hilarious, and amazing as I do.

So please consider checking it out and throwing it a couple bucks if you can!

[essential-randomness]

Finally almost done with the learn.fujoweb.dev writers style guide, a prerequisite for hiring writers to help us help EVEN MORE hobbyists pick up advanced webdev skills.

I hope to start looking into candidates next week, in the meantime our survey is still active!⬇️

[fujocoded]

New Contractor Announcement ✨

Friends, please welcome our new contractor and first-official-sysadmin, Kat 🎉

Kat is not only a long-term member of Fandom Coders, but a prolific self-hoster of fandom software, and we're SO excited to have her aid in our quest!

Over the next few months Kat will work on getting our servers in order: from backing up our data, to setting up monitoring of our resources (no more accidental 20GB log file), to much needed "service down!" alerts. She'll also help us set up infrastructure for future services!

This is Kat's first professional experience as a sysadmin, and a huge step in our mission to create opportunities for members of the fandom community!

If you'd like to join us, we're looking for writers, technical and not! Drop your contact in our form 👇⬇️👇

And if you'd like to give *your* aid to our mission of creating professional opportunities for software hobbyists (and beyond) in our community, ESPECIALLY now that being a junior in tech is so incredibly hard, support us on Patreon!

Help us help them help the web!!

(Last thing, to get ahead of potential questions about Kat's TOS banning certain content from her sites: we talked extensively about her stance on issues dear to fandom, and we're comfortable with where she stands. Likewise, we stand by her right to choose what she's personally comfortable hosting.)

[fujowebdev]

Kickstarter Update + Monday's Stream

We just published our new Kickstarter update, outlining our new year work plans for Volume 0 of "The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development" (Git & GitHub).

We also announced our next stream: add a contact form to your website, and send those messages to your Discord server!

In this stream, we’ll recap what we learned about forms during December, and start diving into the fascinating–and very useful!–world of webhooks. We’ll also work on writing down an article with some of the “forms know-how”, so our work can be useful beyond the video format.

We’re also trialing two new labels for streams:

 Beginners Friendly: streams that tackle concepts that should be accessible (albeit maybe a bit of a skills-stretch) to people with beginner webdev knowledge.  

 Beginners Welcome: streams that tackle advanced concepts/work that is beyond the reach of most beginners. However, beginners are still welcome to attend, absorb new knowledge, and ask questions as we go!

This next stream will be Beginners Friendly! We'll assume some familiarity with Static Site Generation and HTML/CSS, but we'll be happy to answer questions as needed and help everyone get up to speed.

See you tomorrow, Monday January 8th at 3PM PST on Twitch!

[fujocoded]

Event Announcement!

Join FujoCoded at Escapade, the original slash slumber party with three decades of fannish history, in Los Angeles, CA from Jan. 31st to Feb. 2nd! Come chat with us about fandom, join our panels, and maybe even buy an exclusive new Fujoboard...

Want to attend in-person? There's still time to sign up!

You can also register for the upcoming online-only Escapade 35.5 or donate to help out this long-standing fandom tradition directly ($20 gets you access to the Escapade 35 Discord!)

@essential-randomness will be hosting 3 panels this year, all about a better fannish internet:

What's up with BlueSky (and decentralized social networks)?

The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development - Building a Fandom from Scratch

Personal Fannish Websites (co-hosted with Elf)

Finally, Escapade needs your help! Even if you can't attend, there are still tons of ways to chip in and help secure the future for this piece of fandom history. Spread the word, tell your friends!

And here's the exclusive Escapade FujoBoard.... under the cut!

See you in the vendor alley for this, our other merch, and maybe some more "exclusive merch" from Ms Boba's personal stash of samples!