November 24 2025
I went ahead and added some more embeds to the site, which brings the total to three: embedded Etsy shop listings, embedded free Ko-fi listings, and embedded Tumblr posts.
It does go a bit against the spirit of having one's own website, but I don't have a great alternative at present-- I guess whenever the embeds break, they break! Here's my predictions for what that'll look like:
- Etsy embed breaks first. The embed feature is already technically not supported any more, so it's only a matter of time before someone at Etsy remembers to turn the capability off.
- Ko-fi embed breaks second. It's not officially maintained by Ko-fi, so it'll go until the individual maintaining it drops the project.
- Tumblr embed breaks last-- that site refuses to die! But I think that my site will outlast it.
November 21 2025
I got to be part of a cross-stitch charity collection this month: a whole cadre of pattern artists each designed a pattern for a bookmark (here's mine), and then all 30 patterns were put into a ZIP file and emailed out (by the organizer and a small team of volunteers) to anyone who sent in a proof of donation to any of a list of refugee- and immigration-centric charities.
It's a good model! And it is looking to have been a success: the final tally isn't in yet, but I know it's well over ten thousand dollars raised.
This isn't really a site update. Just: I got to be part of something cool! And it rocked!
Peace out! ✌️
November 9 2025
After a fair bit of dithering, I went ahead and plunked a copy of this site up on Neocities. I really, really enjoy how easy it is to browse sites there, and have spent ages just putzing around checking them out-- so I figured it made sense to add my own site to the pile!
The Neocities fork will probably run a little behind the main site as far as updates go, and there is a chance that updating both at all will be a hassle- but hey, if it comes to that, I can always close it down.
This summer when I decided to make this site I originally planned to host it on Neocities, but they don't support PHP, and I figure half the point of having my own site is the ability to do my janky surveys. I have so many more ideas of ones that'd be interesting to run-- but there'll be time!
That's the core of it always, I suppose-- you could work on cool projects all day, every day, until the sun runs out, and there'll always be more to do!
October 25 2025
The pattern gallery and pattern pages have all been redone!
Big features: first, they're cute and colorful. Big plus! Second, all the stitching info is included on the page, too-- colors used, dimensions on different fabrics, et cetera.
I went a little script-crazy with the pattern pages (a script to fill in the photos, the details, to calculate the dimensions), and my gut feeling is that that's not exactly best practices, but it works and keeps my workload light when I want to add a new pattern, so I'm keeping it.
Somewhere in my satchel is a post-it with the first sketch for the gallery page: a scribbled grid with the work 'SKEUMORPHISM' on it. The background assets are some wallpaper scans from the Smithsonian archive, heavily modified. Once I had this page + the pattern pages figured out, I took the colors from them and gave a new coat of paint to the main page, too.
Another nice bit: as I put up each Pride Flag Planet, I wrote a little seek-and-find game for each of them. I'd thought about doing that when I first made them, but I didn't want to clutter the Tumblr captions.
Pattern gallery count: 38 up, ~32 still to go.
Peace out! ✌️
-Mathy
September 22 2025
It seems a bit out of place to journal about what the site *should* have, rather than what it does, but-- oh, the site needs more CSS!
The Pattern Gallery in particular really needs to look better-- it's getting fuller and fuller by the day, but it could stand to get *cuter* at some point, too. Still, better to have a full and plain site than a flashy and empty one.
Pattern gallery count: 31 up, 39 still to go (though I keep finding more to add to that total).
-Mathy
August 16 2025
A lot of little changes recently!
The main note: the site's a bit prettier now! I don't know exactly yet how I'd like it to look, but I've had a few ideas and acted on them. Many of the pages now have nice pixel fonts for the headers, and I've added some CSS styling to the Pattern Gallery and the Cross Stitch Connections. I haven't dared to touch the styling for the Nonograms yet-- after all the problems there were getting the puzzles error-checked and online originally, I remember throwing up my hands and letting the website basically go up 'as-is', styling be damned. Not looking forward to untangling whatever mess I left behind!
More patterns are up, too, of course-- but there are so many to go! It'll be ages.
I do like the rough and handmade look for the site. It needs more games, art, and jokes though. I'm working on that.
Added an actual placeholder for the Etsy shop link-- it still doesn't go anywhere, but at least it's not a 404 any more. Out of all the original placeholder links that one's the lowest priority, tbh-- I'd like the games, data stuff, art, etc etc to be the actual meat of the site. If people want to buy stuff they know where to look for it!
Websiting is still super fun. Now, to bed with me!
-Mathy
August 4 2025
Websites are fantastic!
I added a little shrine-- a collection of photos of my Mother's (and my) favorite childhood doll, Carmen. I think that means we're almost a proper website now-- you know a site isn't really a proper site unless it has a shrine page and a links page. (That'll be coming eventually.)
I've also putzed a LOT with the 'random pattern' box on the home page, and I think it's finally working: it sits cutely in its little side space on desktop, moves properly to the bottom of the page on mobile, displays a random alternate shot of the pattern when hovered over, and has all the text wrap around it. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good feat for a CSS amateur!
This whole website affair feels terrific. A little digital house of my own, for all my various projects to live in-- it's marvelous. I ought to have made a website years ago.
July 29 2025
Whew! There's a lot to get together with this whole website thing!
I redid a bunch of the code for the pattern gallery pages; if I'm going to have any chance of getting all the patterns up, then I need the code to be streamlined. I've got it to a place where I can copy-paste a page for a pattern, fill in its pattern code name in the header, type up some flavor text, and then have everything else be auto-populated from a spreadsheet list: the shop link, the tumblr link, and all the photos. The same list is also used to construct the main pattern gallery page and the 'random pattern' box on the homepage. Convenient for me-- when I put another pattern in, I only have to add it to that spreadsheet and write the flavor text!
With that in place, I added a half-dozen more patterns to the gallery. Only about fifty more to go!
-Mathy
July 27 2025
Well, Rinkworks has a Site Journal, so I guess my site should have one too.
Currently just working on collecting everything I already have into one place: the Pi Day Nonograms, the Pi day Conections puzzles, the Etsy pattern survey PHP thing (still ugly as sin, but I got it working again!), my whole stack of cross-stitch patterns, that one fiber arts multifandom AMV thing, maybe the results of the Tumblr tournaments too-- there's a lot to import!
Feels good to start getting everything in one place. Watching Cohost (a site I really liked) go under and then watching Twitter (which I didn't) messily implode has had me thinking it was about time I got all my stuff onto a site I owned. Tumblr's still kicking-- by some miracle-- but if and when that one goes dark it's gonna hit me hard.
Plus, this way I can do more ambitious projects! The AI-data-sorting project was a neat one, and I'm dying to do more things in that vein. Now that I've got that code running again, there's no limit to the number of things that we can sort!
It's felt fantastic to get to fully dive into a project. I started on this site a week ago, with most of it coming together in the last 48 hours. Still so much to do, but-- it's a great start!
Peace out, everyone, and welcome to Mathysphere dot Gay!
✌️
-Mathy