Update thing · 12:07pm Oct 23rd, 2013

So, I'm still alive. The Writer Of Fate posted on my userpage that I should likely do a blog post to tell you guys what's up. And so here I am, telling you what's up.

I guess first off I should explain what I have been doing, before going and apologising for what I haven't been doing. And what I have been doing, is school work mostly. As some of you might know, I'm fairly young compared to most people on the site, and am currently in my first year of Sixth Form (not sure what the equivalent is for the US, sorry). I've been shoved more than pushed into trying to achieve good grades, and that has meant that a lot of my time has been devoted to bettering my academic study (curse you Asian parents). I finished my GCSEs in July some time and got my results on the 22nd of August. Having gained 7 A*s (A* is a seperate grade from an A in the UK) and 5 As, I went on and chose my A Levels. I decided to go with Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Computing, because I apparently like to torture myself. But anyway, they've been going well, but they're certainly time-consuming.

As for Fimfiction related stuff, I stepped down from my admin position in TECS and handed it over the rather more hard-working Burraku-Pansa. I've not really checked in with them for a while, but last I heard it wasn't doing too badly. I then decided to take up a different group admin position with the Twiluna group, because reasons. My work with Authors Helping Authors and The Proofreader Group has been ongoing, with me now helping enforce the new story addition rules in AHA, and working on site guff with TPG. Speaking of which, proofiction.net is also something I should talk about.

Now, proofiction.net was started by me and BronyMaster a long while back. I can't remember how long, but it must be around 7 or so months ago. Now this site came about, because both me and BM happened to be attempting to learn HTML at the same time, and he put forward the idea of a website for The Proofreader Group, which I thought was a pretty swell idea. However, we quickly realised that we didn't know jack. Sadly, I don't have any images of the initial site design to show you guys, but needless to say it was none too pretty. Also there was little to no functionality. Bear in mind, though, that we had started making this site maybe a few weeks or so after we had started learning from scratch. Anyway, we asked in TPG's fimfiction forum for anyone willing to help us out with making the site.

To our surprise, we managed to rope in Cynical, who was probably not aware of what he was then to go through. I'll never know why he decided to accept our call, nor why he then decided to stay on after we showed him what it looked like, but ah well. Anyways, a while after Cynical came to work with (instead of?) us, we had this:

Ignore the guff on the right screen, these are screenshots I had lying about on imgur, and I'm too lazy to crop them and then reupload. But needless to say, this was pretty much leaps-and-bounds above what he had had previously, not only did we now have a login system and a phpbb3 forum (though both of these were rather iffy at the time), we even had the basic template design that we still have today, though I reckon it's rather nicer looking nowadays. The forum styling stayed pretty much the same once we got the ChesterBlue template and theme for it. If you're interested in looking more at what it looked like back then, here's the initial web dev thread. Also, behold the majesty of the first profile design:

Whilst Cyni was working on the back-end to make sure the site actually worked, I started learning how to style websites so that they didn't look as bad as they could have. I then instantly found out that light blue did not work (I had also switched to Linux in that time):

For whatever reason, I had been trusted to style the website (for those who don't know, I have next to no artistic talent whatsoever). And so this happened:

After a while, I changed various bits and pieces (this was around exam time so things were slowed down somewhat) and eventually ended up with basically what the site currently looks like. If you want to check out the web dev thread for that, it's here.

Now, I haven't really changed much since the initial open beta release, just styled a few tables here and there or whatnot. It's been mostly Cynical working behind the scenes, doing a whole buttload of work just to make sure everything is easier to use and works faster (or actually works, as the case may be). I suppose the biggest change I've done stylistically is for the dev site, which isn't officially released yet, so I've screenshotted it for you to view below (Bear in mind I have a tiny screen, so it'll likely look better on yours:

This should make it look better on a mobile or whatnot too. Below is a screenshot of the site from my iPod:

Not sure what's up with the top-right corner, I'll try to figure it out sometime.

Anyways, that was all I really wanted to say about proofiction.net. If you do feel like giving some feedback on the site in terms of its design (please give feedback, I have no idea what I'm doing), then feel free to PM me or post it as a comment or whatnot.

So that's what I have being doing. What I've been neglecting, on the other hand, is writing. Now I'm sure it's technically true if I say that I haven't been writing because I haven't had much time, but it's more than that. As austinb963 recently reminded me, it's been getting on for one whole year since I last updated Oldnew Luna: After the Dawn, and it would rather foolish for me to say that I've not had time to write in that time. What I haven't really had, however, is the motivation or incentive that I used to have for this story. This is going to sound weird (because it is), but even though I really would like to continue with this story and many more other ones, I just can't seem to do it. It's not like I don't have a reason to be motivated; after all, people are still commenting this far along on both fanfiction.net and fimfiction that they would like it if I continued the story, how much of an incentive is that? But still, I can't bring myself to do it. I guess the best theory I can come up with is that I burnt out. I'm really hoping that, since my new subjects and my life in general requires me to write very little, that I will eventually have such a desire to write once more that I can channel it into getting back into my stories. And I hope that, when that time comes, you'll still find what I write worth reading.

Thanks again for everything you guys have done for me. This was just a summary update for several months of my life, so I realise it is likely rather boring, but if you read through everything and got to this message, I salute you.

Dan

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