What is Wilson up to?

Home

Previously, the homepage was a simple about box, as well as a list of the latest posts and projects. One of my biggest gripes with the previous design was that it felt very horizontally restricted. Especially compared to the VOD page, which utilized more screen real estate. So, I wanted to replicate it.

Similarly, I feel like a lot of the focus that I’ve had on the website so far has been on the VOD archive. It felt unneccessary to have to navigate to a specific page for VODs, when it’s what I would consider the primary functionality. Thus, VODs play a much more important role on the new homepage.

The new homepage combines both the old VODs page, and the old home page, to create a giant feed of the latest content. First and foremost, the latest VOD is featured at the top as well as a couple recent streams lower on the page, just like the old VODs page. Then, just like the old homepage, the latest posts and projects are also featured near the bottom.

All VODs Page

While the old VODs page is no longer, the new VODs page utilizes the same layout I used to show all the VODs (/vods/all). Except, now there are convinent buttons to filter the VODs by date, and to filter them by game category.

Not only that, but the page that lets you filter VODs by date now sorts them better, with every year being its own category with each month of VODs. This makes it easier to find a VOD from a specific date. No longer will you have to scroll through the home page to filter by date or game.

Do keep in mind: with this site being primarily static, creating a search page would be a lot of work. But it may exist at some point.

Authors

This website is now a pretty heavily modified version of the astro-erudite template, built by enscribe. In this template, there existed a functionality that allowed you to browse the “profiles” of different authors of blog posts.

However, I felt like I didn’t really need this functionality as I will be the only person making posts here, so as of this redesign, that functionality has been removed.

What does privacy-first mean?

The idea behind privacy-first is that all computing and data processing is stored entirely on your own device. This means that no sensitive data is ever sent to any server.

While right now, there are no tools that rely on a server, the plan is to eventually have a “bridge” that runs as an app in the background of your computer. All that this app will do, is act as a server for any tools that DO rely on third-parties. Take for example, a Spotify overlay. The configuration page and overlay will simply be a frontend to interact with the bridge. The bridge will be responsible for storing the proper credentials locally, communicating with the Spotify API, and then communicating with the frontend.

The main reason for making it this way, is that I don’t want to bear the responsibility, and more importantly, the cost of running a publicly accessible server. If you didn’t know, when you operate a website or app where user information is collected, you open yourself up to leagues of legal liability. I’d like to avoid that as much as possible.

What tools are currently in the toolkit?

Right now, there isn’t much of anything. There are two tools that I have made so far:

• Word Tracker: This tool uses your browser’s speech to text API to track the number of times you say one or more specific words.
• Chatvoice: This tool uses your browser’s text to speech API to read Twitch chat messages aloud and assign them specific voices.

I’m planning on adding more, and fixing up the existing ones, but a lot of the big things that I want to do will require me to create the “bridge” I mentioned earlier.

For example, one of the things that I want to add is assigning each chatter their own emote. Then when they speak, there will be an overlay that you can add to your streaming software that will display their emote moving along with their message. Maybe even a little speech bubble. That would be cute. But of course, this will require a way to communicate between configuration pages, and the overlay. That’s where the bridge will be needed.

Any future plans?

Right now, there’s nothing concrete. But I do have some ideas for things that I’d like to add. But I’m not entirely sure if it’s worth the effort. But here’s the rundown. Also, full disclosure, if you don’t know the context of what I’m talking about, don’t worry. It’s not that important.

• Easier way to view memes: In the future, I might want to make submissions be sent to a database. Then, I could have a page that will automatically randomize the order of submissions. Once the guessing is over, Capy can click to reveal who the meme is from, and move on to the next one. This would save a lot of time, and would also create an archive of all the submissions in the process.
• Emotemons: While we’re on the topic of a database, what if we added commands to the bot where viewers could see what emotemons or other stuff they or others chatters have? View their statistics, or a global “mondex” where you can look at all the emotemons. It would be cool, but a lot of work.
• Leaderboards: Still on the same topic of a database, I think a leaderboard/statistics command would be cool. But I could also see how it could get too competitive. The idea is you could see how many times someone has participated in a specific event, how many times they’ve won, how many points they’ve earned, and potentially make a leaderboard out of it.

Why make it?

In all honesty, there wasn’t really any reason to make it, other than the fact that I felt like it would be more useful than what we already had. Oh, and also because I like the fancy bot developer badge that Discord gives you.

But for real, sometimes I just like making things, and this is one of those times. It’s simple enough and opens the door to more possibilities in the future. If Capy wants to run an event thats a little more complicated, there’s a chance that having the structure already in-place could make it all the more possible.

What’s the point?

The idea is that if I have a place where I can quickly jot down my feelings, I will much more inclined to update it. The way the blog is right now, and I don’t see this changing, each post is (usually) manually written in a code editor, and are stored as .mdx files. And I’m very comfortable in writing like that, but for quick notes, the entire process is a bit of a pain in the ass. Memos, on the other hand, let’s me write things very quickly as long as I’m logged in on whatever device.

I also think I’ll enjoy the seperation of personal “diary-esque” entries and the much more long-form “blog-esque” entries here on the site. This kind-of allows people to filter what they want to see. I don’t want my website to be entirely posts talking about my life and “woe is me!” So this seems like a good middle ground to me.