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Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 8:53 am
by Lethe
Image

(Elysa made the button for me ehehehe.)

!!! I'm so happy I managed to finish my first big shrine!! I do think I've challenged myself immensely with this one since I plunged into it right after finals (instead of doing what I usually do: plunge into video games) and wanting to get most of it done before the second part of finals (this Friday T_T), but I'm so glad I did. I feel like I've grown, and seeing that you're able to create something is a wonderful feeling.

Feedback is more than welcome. :heart:

Also... I don't know whether this is the right place to ask, but does anyone know what I can do to make the letters look better in Firefox? I tried to do the webkit-font-smoothing thing, but it seems to kill the first-letter display; that aside, the background of first-letter doesn't look as good in Firefox either compared to Chrome. (screenshots: Chrome / Firefox on Windows 7)

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 12:31 pm
by Robin
OH!! What a gorgeous layout and site structure! I am in love with the font choices and the background texture and the booky style everything saldkfjal;skdjfa;lskdjf;alskdjflsakdjf;aojglaksdjkl

/nerdgasming

I admit I don't know much about Magic Knight Rayearth, but just the way you've set the site up, content-wise, makes it attractive to learn more despite the unmarked spoilers :D It's clear how much love and effort you've put into this fantastic shrine, and you cover all the aspects of Cephiro (as well as its characters).

(By the way, I'm sorry to say I don't know how to fix the first-letter weirdness in Firefox, but personally it didn't detract from my browsing through [and I was using Firefox]. ^_^)

Also, in keeping with the book theme, what if you linked your various articles in each section together with "previous page" and "next page" links, and then at the end of each section have a link for "go to next chapter" to go to the next section? That way people could almost literally "page" through your site without having to go back to the section menus each time. I know this would be a lot of work, though :/

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 12:46 pm
by Mikari
I love how you arranged this site, it all looks so pretty! Firefox uses moz instead of webkit but the site looks fine on Firefox so I guess you must have already fixed it. The way the images compliment the text and the mouse over boxes are a nice effect. There so much information here so detailed and well put together.

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 12:58 pm
by Todd
Wow, congratulations, Lethe! The shrine is gorgeous! I'm not familiar with the subject at all, but I did read some of the shrine, and your passion for the subject is super noticeable. I'm glad you made it! I'll read through it more tonight.

I noticed the updates link on the index page leads to a dead link. :/

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 2:27 pm
by Lethe
Gooosh you're all such lovely people. ;_; Thanks for visiting the shrine!!

@CuriousLittleBird:
asjdlasjdljkl your comment and appreciation of the booky style make me so happy!! I had A BIG DOWN after finishing the coding and testing it in Firefox only to see things look really weird (there were other visual issues at an earlier stage) lol! I thought people would open the site in Firefox and then leave immediately, so I'm glad to hear that display issues didn't detract from the experience. <3

Hehe, if you're interested in checking out MKR, you might want to hold off reading the last ~chapter~ of the first act. <3

Your suggestion is FANTASTIC! :OO I hadn't thought of that, but anything that adds to the ~history book~ feel sounds like a great addition. I'll definitely give this more thoughts coding-wise once I'm done with my oral exams, thanks so much. ^_^v

@Mikari:
Nah, it's not fixed yet haha. The fonts look very... jagged (?) and rough in Firefox, not smooth and slim as they're supposed to (anti-alias? idk my terms). I copy pasted this from the internet, but I'm not even sure it changed anything, but refreshing the page made the first-letter stuff go away (might have been my imagination, but for a while it looked like it only affected the index page, too), so I just removed it immediately:

Code: Select all

    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
No idea what's going on with that code!

Thank you for the kind words. :D It's the first time I'm using the mouse over boxes thing, and I'm happy with how it turned out. :D

@Todd:
Thank you! <3 I'm glad I was able to convey my passion! It's something I always worry about after writing a lot of information (not essay) sections because I'm so charmed by how some people in the community make their presence known throughout the shrine even when writing information sections ("I" pronoun, humour), and I can't do that. XD

Thanks especially for reading even though you're not familiar with it at all. <3

And lol! The update link is, as far as I know, the only broken thing on the site and I had hoped nobody would catch it until I've got time to set up a network update page in a few days (hopefully)! Nice catch. XD I think I'll take it down for now and make a note to put it back in later. :D

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 2:45 pm
by dubiousdisc
I am not familiar with the source material, but I can tell you here and now that the layout is nothing short of GORGEOUS and that I second Todd in how, even without knowing, I can tell how much effort you put into this! :)

I wanted to tell you about the font thing: I've been playing around with it and, for me, just changing the font size to 17 or 18px rather than 16 makes it look far better in Firefox. At least to my sensibilities, it doesn't look like it impacts the looks of the site that much, so perhaps you should consider that. Sometimes it's really just a matter of certain sizes with certain fonts.

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 9:02 pm
by Larissa
Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness! :!: :star:

This is such an absolutely lovely surprise. So, full disclaimer that I haven't read MKR in years and years and I remember very little from it, but this is just-- this is so lovely. This entire site was a joy to read through. I don't think I've ever seen a site where the world of a series was presented as the subject, nor would I ever thought it would work, but this site is the proof that it can work beautifully and I'm really, really impressed by it. And it's so fitting for the subject! As you said on the index, Cephiro is in fact the central figure of the series and it makes sense to analyze MKR through that lens. I'm floored by how original it is and how you've managed to take what could have been traditional series fansite and turn it into a much more focused 'character' site.

(Also the design is stupendous and everything flows so well and I love the little character boxes that have more information. What a gorgeous touch.)

I love the way you split up the sections between the two halves of the series, and the information within helped refresh my memory of what MKR was actually about; it was all very easy to follow. (Although I'd forgotten a lot of the weirder aspects of the series. Like, I love MKR and all, but it's such a weird series, even for CLAMP. Especially the second half.)

I think the appendix is really the standout of the entire site, though. Your article on placing MKR within the context of CLAMP's canon is absolutely spot-on, the article on symmetry is fantastic, and I'd never realized just how much of a JRPG the series is until that page. Seriously, thank you for this site just for that section, I absolutely loved it.

I do agree with Robin above that you would benefit from next-page links to help with the flow through the site, though!

I feel like I could rave about this site all day, it's so good. :heart: Congrats on getting it done, you've clearly put a lot of work into it!

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 11:05 pm
by Mikari
If the part you want to change has a class maybe limiting the code to that class would work? This is what it looks like for me. A little bit different but not by much and it still looks good on both.

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2015 7:09 am
by Lethe
Aaah so much love. ;_; I've been so overwhelmed with feels since yesterday lol, I haven't created something so big in a long time and I'm just amazed to experience again, for the first time in a long time, what it feels like when the feelings and passion - something so intangible - you've put into your creation actually manage to reach others. It's an amazing sensation that fills you with appreciation for creative efforts, people and life. :heart: lol I drift off into sentimentality way too often on this forum, but that's because you're all so lovely. :heart:

@dubiousdisc:
Thank you!! <3 <3 That's a neat suggestion and one I hadn't thought of, thanks for trying it out for me! I'll give it a try after Friday and hope that by then, I haven't got so used to it that changing the font size makes me go :?: :puff: :bleh: :worry: - slightly worried about some text sections looking weird afterwards (with the floating images). XD

@Larissa:
ilu so much!! :heart: :heart: :music2: :star:

Thanks for spending so much time reading my shrine and for the lengthy and detailed feedback. <3 <3 It's so so so interesting to get feedback from people who are entirely unfamiliar with the shrine's subject, people who know it intimately and people who remember it from long ago.

Thanks for complimenting the appendix, too! That one was the last part I wrote (despite the RPG page perhaps being the one I was looking forward to the most when I created the shrine lol, because it's so fun) because it's so... intimidating. But I'm glad it resonated with you and that you don't think I got CLAMP totally wrong lolol! I was also worried how the JRPG page would be received because I'm not sure people like reading so many bullet points, but a different format didn't seem to be fitting.

I'd love it if more people did shrines for fictional worlds! I'd go straight to heaven if I had a bunch of FF world shrines to roll around in. (I remember about 1-2 that are either world shrines or something close to it, like, including mythology; got to dig them up later.) Your FFXII shrine is among the ones I look forward to reading the most after finals are really over precisely for this reason. *O*

:heart: :heart: :heart:

@Mikari:
I appreciate the screenshot, thanks! :D It doesn't look to bad in that screenshot... Not sure whether it's because it's zoomed in... 8D But since several people here use Firefox and didn't go "OMG UGLY", it seems as though it's not as big of a deal as I thought it'd be... o_o I'll try the code again and poke around more later. :D

Re: Strength of Heart

Posted: Thu Jul 09, 2015 4:01 pm
by Mikari
I use Firefox 39. I was going to have a look at it and zoom in/out to see if it changed, but I get a 404 from the link now O.o;;