It’s been a while since I did a general update about the website. It was last time just about the fact I was adding more header images to my site, and it was five years after the last time where I was sorting the tumblr export for my 365 blog and a couple other things. That’s the fun of a site that just lets you post whatever you want and you run it, you don’t have to care when you spin up over 1,000 posts containing art.
Artist rendition of me doing things on my site. Yes it counts if I was the artist
This is very much going to be a longish post as I have a lot of thoughts and also updates to mention, I’m not saying I was putting things off but Cohost’s shut down has spurred me to work on things.
When I first set up this site I had an aim of it being a “professional” space for me, DarkOverord, but since making that decision in 2018 the site has correctly transitioned to just being a general space for me, DarkOverord (did you know I’m DarkOverord? Just making sure). With the fragmentation of social media from porn bans that run algorithms that cause false flags for posts, idiots who put in an offer to buy a social network and then proceed to ruin the thing in a public meltdown, and other sites that sadly can’t support themselves without compromising rigid principles they followed shutting down, I do think this was the right decision to do.
With that aim I have started to tap in to the various things we would do back then, hell I still do for most web-comics I follow, and start utilising the RSS feed that is literally built in to WordPress. You can see it over there right now (unless you’re on mobile where it’s at the bottom of the page :V), whoa I even added the RSS logo to make it obvious, how handy!
Technically almost everything on a WordPress site can be an RSS feed by appending /feed/ on the end, but for now I’ve just made the main blog feed and art category feed visible with an obvious link. I don’t really think the other categories need it, but if you do for some reason want my game rambling for example as an rss feed, just append /feed/ to the end of the URL.
I think they’re neat
But then if I am truly working to make my website more than just “a place DarkOverord professionally represents itself” then truly I need to tap in to something else we’ve lost about how the web was back in the late 90s/early to mid 00s, a links page. Sometimes it was called “web rings”, sometimes just “links”, other times “affiliates”, but regardless of the name used it was about the website owner going “I think this is neat”.
With that in aim, I have set up the dedicated “Friends and Other Cool Links” page dedicated to personal websites and other cool things, a probable eternal WIP on my website (what isn’t? I still haven’t made my fursona and OC pages public, yes, they exist as both a general landing page and an “at a glance” page) but it’ll be good to actually go “here are peeps I think are cool”. I will be aiming to not have linktrees/etc., not because I don’t think that those who only have that kind of presence aren’t worth it, but mostly because, well honestly they’re nothing more than landing sites for their social media presence. “DO but isn’t WordPress effectively doing that?” in some ways yes, but I made concious choices for the theme I used, the colours I had to make a fake plug-in to use, all the extra CSS I added and so on in contrast to someone’s Fur Affinity, Mastodon or Bluesky account where the only control they have is generally just their icon, username, bio and what they post. This isn’t to say on blog posts and so on I’d never link to them, but that’s not what the Friends and Other Cool Links page is for.
We also had fun little buttons that we shared for it, sure we could use flat out hyperlinks but the buttons meant we could a little flare to represent ourselves. I say all this as someone who actually didn’t do that as I didn’t have a personal website at the time, but I was part of a sprite comic site so we did have fun little buttons. But I knew their point. Cohost’s final day finally prompted me to make one of those now tiny 88 x 31 pixel buttons (they didn’t feel so tiny back when that was almost 10% of your screen on a page), why? Well Cohost honestly got a resurgence of peeps using them, which is neat. Here’s an entire page full of them (in fact they have five pages full of them) if you want a snapshot of what 90s/00s internet was like because companies and the like had their own official ones too, but some in their are entirely new which is just as cute.
A small gif and a static ver, like you used to get back in the day. I think they’re cute.
I have some small grumps mind, the text I had to compromise on because V doesn’t work well in 4 pixels wide, and to make it fit in the middle the E is 3 pixels, but I like how they came out.
Next up is something I’d thought I’d never allow but here we are. I’ve, with worry, enabled discussion on my posts (that are less than 90 days old). Originally I wished to avoid this as it means I have to moderate my own site, and that people can just reply to my stuff elsewhere, but now that we’re seeing the internet get restrictive and darker, maybe it’s good to allow people to reply here. Originally I had intended to allow replies via the Fediverse but I just could not get the discussion feature to work. My site would federate, but any replies to posts just would not appear here. I’m testing it again to check though in case it was an issue with making my test post an unlisted post. We’ll see if it works!
We’ll see if I regret this later! I hope not!
Artist rendition of me committing the act of making words.
We now run in to the realm of more minor updates, even if they are “significant”? I guess? My personal links page, as in the links for me not others, has been updated. Most of this was removing sites I either don’t use any more or have sadly shut down, and updating Backloggery’s icon (I prefer the old one but it wasn’t really suited for being bigger than 16×16 pixels). The other notable points on this are that I’ve added both my 
last.fm and 
Twitch. last.fm is admittedly mostly there for the sake of it but I am trying to listen to my music library more again, not rely on YouTube (I only ever used Spotify for when I really wanted to listen to music I didn’t have and didn’t want to deal with YT, this was rare).
Twitch however is something I am planning on using more, alongside 
Picarto for spicier pieces, to have more focus on actually doing art. I’ve slipped in to a bad habit in the past two years, but especially the past 4 months, of struggling to focus on doing art, and not because I dislike doing it it’s just a focus issue. Y’know what streaming it does? Forces me to actually work on it.
I also plan on doing more game things ‘cus likewise I’ve a backlog of games I’d like to do and sitting down and playing games has also been hard. These absolutely would be less than the art streams. Once I have a backlog, or feel confident about it, I’ll start making the VoDs public on my 
YouTube as while I’m not affiliate my VoDs are only on Twitch for 7 days.
I have two VoDs already available, I’d have more but I forgot to enable VoDs before the first two streams, an art stream and a Minecraft Cobblemon stream.
And now the most minor updates, which you may have already noticed, you may not have! My site’s theme is set up to have the two column layout on everything that isn’t the home page, even when it doesn’t feel appropriate. So I spent a while bashing CSS with a hammer and now all non-blog posts are single columns.
It was genuinely something that always frustrated me, I love this theme but forcing the blog sidebar on everything really frustrated me. Now it’s possible I was either too dumb to find the option to stop it appearing elsewhere or I was right to take a hammer to the CSS, but now I’m much happier with it.
That should be everything done now for updates, as far as I recall at least. I’ve minor things I want to do like update my art page with new art etc., but that doesn’t really warrant an update post.