June Attuned

(Publicado el 12/6/2021.)

Hello! As is regular now, we've an update short yet sweet to share today. Following personal direction in a hobby project, most wiki work has been put into internal restructuring, though in revisiting each page, we've written a few UI refinements too. Details, as ever, past the split!

As ever, thank you to everyone who sent feedback and kind messages during development! We're also very grateful for all supporters of the wiki, including: enchantingHunter, Gradis, and Nights!

As mentioned in the summary, I've been following my own interests in wiki development, so a good deal of the work done this month was on further internal restructuring. For the most part, it's been a big refactor! The focus this month was to break up the giant file responsible for all site generation, upd8.js, into more easily navigable modules and utility files. Though work on that isn't quite complete yet, the progress shows: what was previously just short of 7000 lines of code within a single file has been cut down and sorted away to only 3000 now!

(If you're curious, page generation info and templates are all contained within the new src/page directory. The hope is that these modules will be a lot easier to write, maintain, and understand, even for anyone unfamiliar with the wiki codebase!)

Of course, while revisiting each page and tweaking generation code all across the site, a few visitor-visible refinements have been worked in, too:

For group pages, we've made the sidebar sections collapsible, just like on album pages! Only the category you're presently perusing is expanded by default; this should make the list more focused, and welcome wandering at your own pace.
Also for groups, exclusive to the Info page, a new "from (other group)" accent has been added. For albums which show in more than a single group, this will show the other most primary: for example, on the Fandom info page, each album shows where it was released, such as Unofficial MSPA Fans next to Ancestral, and Cristata next to Perfectly Generic Album.
On tag pages, we've flipped around the entry order; it's now sorted reverse-chronologically, meaning the most recent releases show right at the start. New appearances will be noticed right away!
And for the sidebar of album and track pages, we've made sure the list is always collapsible by showing a faux "Track list" section on albums where the tracks weren't manually grouped. The sidebar listing should no longer be a distraction!

Plus, while we haven't added any new albums this update, we've started a new album group titled Beyond, into which we've moved a bunch of releases taking previous stay under Fandom. (Thanks a bunch to the Discord community for helping brainstorm this!) Alongside this are a few new groups for solo artists we'd missed before: Nasqueron, Tensei, and Toby Fox.

Last of all, a number of data fixes have been brought from the wiki community! Find details on these, as usual, in the changelog.

A quick meta-note on the direction of wiki development: with the last few updates, we've been taking wiki work a bit more easily. (See last month's update entry, and the Discord announcement in April, for more info on our rationale here!) New to note, though, is that we've started our own search in job-hunting; that's an arduous process all its own, so energy for programming and data entry is a tad sapped. We still plan on periodic updates by the month, though their scale will likely be comparable to this release.

We've talked about this a good deal in the server, and we're really thankful to feel comfortable trusting you all, the community you've built around the wiki, to understand! It's genuinely an honor to have a kind audience for what's really still our personal hobby at the end of the day, even as we inevitably put more into work and other life focus.

So, as ever, thank you for the support and feedback! Besides the Discord, our usual channels remain open, so you're much welcomed to share any comments or feedback for the coming releases. Thank you!

~ Quasar Nebula

PS: Happy birthday, Karkat! >:]