Over the weekend of April 22, ye olde Granny Squares Color Generator is getting some upgrades! Unlike previous updates, I’m kinda-sorta locking down the database for this one, so blankets can’t be saved during the maintenance window.
It includes getting rid of the already-broken Twitter login (fuck twitter), adding email/password auth, and allowing multiple login methods per user. Not a ton of flashy blanket-related features, but there’s a big database normalization that enables me to set up a not-terrible RESTful API layer, which then lets me implement new blankety features using React.
I went into lots of detail over on the GSC forums, so go read that.
So… I’m writing again, and partaking in a little summer writing project (coined “Hot Blog Summer”) with my partner Dr. Lucy. Good gravy, folks, the amount of plugin clean-up I had to do to get this and my next post out is wild. 😅 While I’m editing my first meaty post, here’s how you can find me these days:
Mastodon
I’m over at irrsinn.life/@melissa, posting about Beat Saber, other games I’m playing, a bit of social justice stuff, and tech. Come chat with me there. I really don’t spend much time on Twitter these days aside from Future Proof Games work and folks I get push notifications for.
Years, folks. Years. That weird fabric texture background is finally going away.
Ever since I’ve thrown myself full-tilt at Future Proof Games, I’ve let my older side projects run as they are with no updates from me unless something was catastrophically wrong.
A lot has changed on the web since Granny Square Colors got a major update from me, though: tablets and smartphones are even more popular among the GSC user base, Internet Explorer isn’t the worst thing to develop for anymore, and I’m a way better architect and coder than I was a handful of years ago.
So… not to put too much pressure on my designer, but I’ve actually hired someone to do a design for Granny Squares!
The site as of July 2014. Its current look was always intended to be revamped down the road — I just needed something simple and clean to get the site rolling. With a few thousand visitors a month now, and with 56% of my users on some form of mobile device, it’s time for a facelift. I’ve gotten a few donations from running the site over the last 3 years, and that’s enough to cover the design costs.
I should have ready-to-implement designs by mid-August. I won’t promise an implementation date yet, but I’ll wrap up whatever version of the site I’m on at that point and make getting the new look in place the priority.
I have a lot of French-, Hungarian-, and Italian-speaking visitors to Granny Squares, and a common complaint by visitors is that it’s only in English.
I would love to have help translating into different languages. I’m going to take a first-pass with Google Translate to implement the above three languages, but here’s my all-call:
Help me translate Granny Squares into your language. You’ll see some (probably rough) French and Italian translations soon (the most popular languages of visitors other than English), but I want your help. Any language goes. Contact me if you’d like to help.
