December Adventure is, in part, an alternative to Advent of Code. The goal is to do a little bit of low-key, personal coding each day. I’m using it as a time to re-engage with old projects and art.
Given the laid-back purpose of the Adventure, I think some equally chill plans are in order. Instead of picking a big project or super precise endpoint for the month, I’ve got two general things in mind to work on:
- Fill out this site, both in content and fixing functionality. In About, I called it a “garden” - it’s time to plant more seeds
Continue work on roots below. I had intended the next update to be all art and sound, but there’s plenty of code cleanup and feature improvement to do too- Clean up some old projects, and expand their documentation here
- Engage with my art practice, working on finding joy in the process
Calendar
Daily Log
Day 1
- added this(!) page
- Implemented calendar you see above, with daily jump-ahead links 😊
- Fixed Linkback / “Related Posts” (check the bottom of the page)
Day 2
- started writeup on an older project called Mercury (unpublished)
- Implemented the ability to show code blocks next to prose here whoooo! Maybe I’ll get syntax highlighting going tomorrow
; MACRO EXPANSION & M REGISTER
@REP 5
COPY @{0,2} M
@END
Day 3
- Clean up
CodeBlock
handling and fix up the way I embed images in posts a bit. Now the sidebar/right column is very flexible in terms of content, making it easier for me to implement things like music or video embeds - Trying out some font changes, eh? eh?
- Added a Language Reference button on OpenXA’s exa-viewer and started filling out the reference (partially complete)
Days 4 & 5
- Almost completed a fix for an issue with OpenXA’s EXA naming
function. Previously it kept incrementing a letter suffix (
XA
,XB
,XC
, etc) and if you had more than 26 initial EXAs, the names would continue down the ASCII table, giving you names likeX[
. Soon, it’ll wrap append a third character to the name and and start over at the beginning of the alphabet ieXYA
- Nothing else of note, adventure-wise for Days 4 & 5. A big
$dayjob
project is coming to a close this week, so free time has been a bit restricted. We’re also dog-sitting for a few days, so there’s a Great Dane in our basement demanding attention 😅
here’s arbitrary text in the sidebar
- here’s a
- small list
Days 6-8
- Between
$dayjob
big project aftermath and dog-sitting, the past few days are a total blur. It’s not really with the “theme” of the December Adventure I originally planned, but despite the unstable schedule lately, I’ve been making time for art and I’m proud of that. - Following along with the above… I’m thinking of adjusting the parameters of this whole adventure. I still want to focus on cleaning up some projects and expanding this site, but I’m also feeling much more of a connection with art lately, so I want to follow that energy!
Day 9
- Added some custom 404 art and customized the 404 page, and got 404 redirection working on Neocities
Day 10
- Added a Gallery template and the beginnings of a art gallery page. Eventually this should get sorted into a couple of separate galleries (and get filled out with more content!). It was fun to implement a custom masonry gallery and required a good bit of fiddling with the overall page template.
- Added prototype for NSFW image blurring
Day 27
- The month got away from me 😅! My December Adventure hasn’t been the most successful or consistent, but I’m still happy with the things I did get done. Earlier in the month, I made some progress resurfacing some older projects. Throughout December, I did a lot of sketching and made some art I really like, as well as improving the tools I have on this site to show that art off.
- On reflection, I think I went in to the month knowing that I’d feel busy and a bit burnt out from work, but I had optimistically hoped that intentionally dedicating time to personal projects would feel restorative. It turns out I really just needed a break more than anything. I’ve had more time to relax this week and after the new year I’d love to more realistically re-approach things like my plans for roots below