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

[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.