Checkpoint 5: Priorities

[nepenthee]

Happy new year, everyone!

As you can guess, things have been quiet around here as December was a busy month. I hope you’ve had a good holiday season, and can start fresh in the new year.

We have one more month until the challenge deadline. How are your shrines coming along? Do you have a preferred order of tackling things, and how do you set priorities in light of the deadline? What are your thoughts on uploading a shrine in unfinished state?

I hope we’ll pull through together and can kick off 2026 with some new shrines! :D

Feel free to use this post to chat about other challenge- and site-related things.

Comments

[blaubeermars]

Hi guys,
my shrine is making sliiiightly progress, but I’m still not satisfied with the layout. I’m having a hard time putting the gallery together in a way that feels right, and I’m also struggling to find the right words to properly describe the relationships. Sadly, I can’t really do any fancy shrine stuff right now... mostly because I don’t have the time, and let’s be real, I’m not skilled enough either, haha. It’s a bit frustrating, but for the moment it’s okay, and I’ll keep working on it. I also missed the last checkpoints because the Christmas season was rough :_:

[nepenthee]

Hi Christina! I was wondering where you'd gone. I hope you've been able to recover a bit from the rough season. If you feel like it, feel free to share your thoughts in the previous checkpoint posts; they're as much staggered discussion topics as they are invitations to periodical progress reports after all. :D

I spied a Frieren figure in a relative's new figure collection over the holidays, and they told me some about the animation, which made me bring up your plans for the shrine hehe. You'll get there, and you'll keep learning and improving!! Which part of the gallery are you struggling with?

[blaubeermars]

Ah, I don’t really don't know. For example, I’m looking for images from the anime—official art without any text but I'm stuck somehow. And something I always find really tedious is making thumbnails. Does anyone have an idea of how to do that quickly? I think it’s the repetitive process of creating these graphics that makes it so exhausting for me, I’m not sure.

[nepenthee]

My go-to places for official anime and manga images are Minitokyo and Zerochan, unless you can somehow get your hands on a full batch of artbook scans. I also stumbled upon Danbooru last year while looking for specific images for a gallery I worked on; as in Zerochan's case, make sure to add the "official" tag to your search (see my example links) or you'll get a lot of fanart and, in this case, many gross views as well. If you're unsure whether an image is really official art, double check with SauceNAO or a similar site. Does that help any? (If anyone knows of more recent dedicated galleries, I would love to know! I miss dedicated artbook galleries run by individuals dearly.)

For mass-making thumbnails of images that are all about the same size (e.g. anime screencaps), I use Easy Thumbnails. I haven't used it yet for images of different sizes, so you'd have to try. If I make thumbnails manually, I use Photoshop actions to speed up the compressing/saving/closing process.

By the way, if it's of any help to you at a different stage, I have listed the tools I use to create galleries (from thumbnail-making to mass-renaming to generating the code) on my repository under "gallery creation".

[blaubeermars]

Oh wow, haha , WHAT? I just checked your site (the credits page) and you literally have EVERYTHING I need. I feel so dumb for never looking there before 😅 I even found a blogging script, which is perfect because I really can’t stand WordPress (sorry!). Thank you so much!!! this makes everything so much easier!
BTW I've been thinking about how I could incorporate the animated Zoltraak idea, and now I'm wondering if I could find a script where a white beam follows the cursor? That would be similar, and I think it would be kind of cool.

I do know Minitokyo (and honestly I think it’s better than Zerochan, since there’s also a ton of artwork in between), but sometimes the site is just inaccessible for me.

[nepenthee]

Haha I'm glad it's helpful! Just ask anytime you wonder whether there's a better way of doing things.

I haven't customized cursors in forever, so I can't help there. I'm fairly certain I've seen cursors with a trail of sparkles on some websites.