A longer ramble
So, uh, after ten months of being a totally lazy mofo (or more precisely, six months of putting it off and then four months trying to burn through it as quickly as possible), the Random Hoo Haas revamp is finished.
What updates have we got after such a long absence? Well, there’s a new music page, for starters, where I throw up MP3s of whatever video game music takes my fancy, as well as links to other music hosted on the various Random Hoo Haas sites. Also, a Wario’s Woods shrine! It mostly exists just so I can dump those manual scans and music downloads somewhere. Also, the Games I Own, Like & Hate section got a long needed update. There’s a whole bunch of new games and a small bunch of new reviews!
Also, hey, remember those blog entries from two years ago where I was translating the work of Otimusya, a Japanese video game humour site? Well, I’ve finally uploaded some of them! The page explains why I’ve been sitting on them for so long. The Balloon Fight page has a couple of lines I didn’t/couldn’t translate, but hopefully it shouldn’t be too distracting. Hopefully I can give the Final Fight one a clean-up and get it uploaded soon.
Regarding the other sites, Metal Slug: Missing in Action has some minor unused graphics updates (I think the MS1 and 2 pages are the only ones with proper additions). Oh! My God!! Why’d They Change That? has been reduced to a bunch of random pages shoved at the bottom of the General Writing section. Not only was it rarely updated, but I’d little intention of updating it again – if I have unused content to report, I can either shove it into the miscellaneous page or just make a shrine for it, like I plan to do with Super Princess Peach and perhaps Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad.
The Bomberman Shrine Place has barely been touched during the revamp period, so it’ll take a while before it springs back to life, I’m afraid. I’ve done a lot of work on updating the Puchi Carat shrine, but it’s not fully finished, so it’ll also have to wait.
Yep, that’s it. For ten months of doing nothing, that’s what I’ve got to show for it. From a reader’s perspective I certainly can’t imagine it was worth the wait, but I’m personally glad I’ve got this thing off my chest.
I began revamping Random Hoo Haas for a variety of reasons. One was that trying to keep my offline files and the site itself in sync with each other was an awkward task – directories were arranged differently between the two, and files were never really kept track of. Another simpler reason was that after five years of working with Microsoft FrontPage, the HTML was just one big mess. Revamping would give me a chance to sit down and properly organise things the way I want it to be, give me the opportunity to dabble in proper HTML without the crutch of FrontPage, and hey, I could use this opportunity to make things pretty!
Though, uh, there’s about 800 or more pages on Random Hoo Haas, and since this would be my first foray into using CSS, it wasn’t an easy task. Ultimately, I’m glad I finally got the chance to revamp the site, and I learnt a lot of things along the way; I do wish I could’ve done more and not just have to leave so many pages exactly as they were originally. But, let’s face it, the final stretch of a project is always the toughest, and delaying things just to work on the minor details.
So, what next for Random Hoo Haas? Well, first, I need a drink and a shower.
Second, while I’d like to work more on the site now that it’s a bit less of a mess, I would like to spend time on other projects. For all of 2011 so far I’ve kinda had this revamp on my mind, knowing it had to be done, so it’ll be nice to just relax and do things at my own pace without thinking “while I’m farting around doing nothing, I could be making really slow progress on the website.” So, no, I’m not in a rush to abandon Random Hoo Haas, but I won’t deny it’s gonna be ignored a lot lately while I hopefully work on other productive mediums.
Boy, that’s a great way of putting people’s concerns to rest, isn’t it?
So long as somebody finds whatever bollocks I have to ramble about on a day to day basis interesting, I’ll still keep up the blog during the site’s inactivity, so I won’t be pulling a disappearing act or anything. Tomorrow I’ll hopefully have a movie ramble that’s a bit more interesting than me just tooting my own trumpet for a dozen paragraphs.
