May 2019
Prepare for another long-winded rant here... because FaceBook has driven me to the brink of my sanity!
Ever since the most unfortunate departure of our proiminent users, I've been racking my brain trying to come up with ways to make this place more appealing to potential new users.
I'm not going to lie to you. I've been in a bad place for the past few months. People I'm friends with tend to hate the living shit out of each other, and it's caused a major divide in my life, as well as this site. Coupled with the stress of going broke and juggling two jobs for adequate hours to make ends meet, I am still holding out hope that TE will survive the fuckery of my detrimental existence.
What do people want? Well, as a web developer, I try to figure out what it is exactly that causes people to gravitate toward certain websites and platforms, and everybody seems to go on facebook, for some damn reason...
So with that said, my best effort has been to emulate that stupid piece of social media they all call "Facebook", and as much as I want to, I can't seem to crack it.
As most of you loyal bastards have seen, I do what I can to give people the proper outlet to express themselves here, and one of those aspects is alternate skins. When the Internet Movie Database shut down its boards, I snagged the source code of those boards immediately and plugged in our TE content to make the TEDb https://trashepics.com/tedb/, a near identical visual representation of our long-lost IMDb message boards. Sure, I got a few cheers, but people still quit TE left and right in favor of lesser, non-compliant representatives of the boards. Fuck my life.
On a whim, I tried to capitalize on the random nostalgia of the mid-2000s by creating the MyWaste https://trashepics.com/mywaste/ rip-off. Truth be told, I thought MySpace was waaay better than Facebook. It allowed customization of one's profile page to create a unique page for users, but seeing as how most people didn't understand how HTML and CSS worked, that caved in on itself because MySpace couldn't fathom those contigencies. That's when you'd see people's profile pages that had WAY too many pictures and conflicting elements that caused pages to load forever, as well as scroll sideways for miles. (Ironically, MySpace thought it would be good to make page layouts automatically scroll sideways, and they fell off the face of the earth after that stupid idea).
So yeah... Nobody took to the idea of MyWaste either. Oh boy... So when we lost a cluster of our best users... to goddamn FREEFORUMS, no less... Holy fucking hell, did that piss me off! We ain't living in the 2000s anymore! TE has more capabilities than that, but they left nonetheless, so in a spiteful effort, I ripped off the look of their shitty FreeForums site for FleaForums https://trashepics.com/app/ff/. Clearly, our userbase was already too fargone for that to matter, so I began to sink into a further depression...
Shortly after this clusterfuck, I figured... why not try my hand at Facebook? Oh, what a grueling task it has been...
I tried dissecting the sourcecode of Facebook to make one great big farce of it, but it's proven to be an arduous effort that has nearly cost me my sanity.
Jesus Christ, does facebook overcomplicate the ever-loving HELL out of their code! I looked at their code and thought I'd be able to emulate it in a couple of days. Boy, was I wrong. It's taken me MONTHS to wrap my head around it, and I'm not even halfway there. I tried to make a TE skin for Facebook, as a means of potential new users having that familiarity to make the transition here as easy as can be, but I still haven't worked out all the kinks. Sure, I've been so busy with work, relationships, and simply trying to eat enough that I don't starve, but GOD DAMN! Why is facebook so complicated?!!!
If anyone is curious, I haven't gotten very far in it, but here's my effort for the Farcebook https://trashepics.com/app/fb/ skin on TE. There are a LOT of holes I have yet to fill in, but there's a vague desktop AND mobile presence to it. Learning how fb operates has taught me a few things, and is why we have the notification system. I'm trying to fathom how the comment system works, and that's also given me a few ideas on how to streamline the TE experience, as well as a boatload of headaches.
Looking at their source code, it's a goddamn miracle that Facebook can even load, because those dumb bastards call hundreds of scriptsets and stylesheets when you view their page. If this was the 90s, it would take a fucking YEAR for these pages to load, because as I've said, facebook is an overcomplicated mess, and I've been trying for MONTHS to get this skin working, and it's barely halfway there.
My God... how stressful this has been, and I don't even have much to show for it. I've been struggling for weeks trying to wrap my head around the comment system, as well as the seemingly infinite amount of conflicting stylesheets it presents that end up making each page visit use about a megabyte of data, which is GODAWFUL. I'm seriously surprised FB loads as fast as it does, because the code for it makes me sick to my stomach just looking at it. It's just bad, bad, BAD!
And what stresses me out even more is that this skin isn't even the only thing I'm working on. I'm still trying to restore Johan's old posts, while trying to update our markup system to be dynamic, among about a dozen other things.
So stressful this has been, and I haven't even gotten to user profiles yet. Sometimes, I wonder why I bother, but sometimes... when I'm drunk and high enough... I can look beyond my own self-pity to remember all the great ideas I have yet to tackle... Ideas for content, media, literature, and so much else that my brain just begins to melt when I think of how little time I have to do any of it.
I love horror, and I love trash. One of these years, I might be able to express myself in a way that people might actually see the filth that I've been dreaming about all my life. Some day, I hope...
Ever since the most unfortunate departure of our proiminent users, I've been racking my brain trying to come up with ways to make this place more appealing to potential new users.
I'm not going to lie to you. I've been in a bad place for the past few months. People I'm friends with tend to hate the living shit out of each other, and it's caused a major divide in my life, as well as this site. Coupled with the stress of going broke and juggling two jobs for adequate hours to make ends meet, I am still holding out hope that TE will survive the fuckery of my detrimental existence.
What do people want? Well, as a web developer, I try to figure out what it is exactly that causes people to gravitate toward certain websites and platforms, and everybody seems to go on facebook, for some damn reason...
So with that said, my best effort has been to emulate that stupid piece of social media they all call "Facebook", and as much as I want to, I can't seem to crack it.
As most of you loyal bastards have seen, I do what I can to give people the proper outlet to express themselves here, and one of those aspects is alternate skins. When the Internet Movie Database shut down its boards, I snagged the source code of those boards immediately and plugged in our TE content to make the TEDb https://trashepics.com/tedb/, a near identical visual representation of our long-lost IMDb message boards. Sure, I got a few cheers, but people still quit TE left and right in favor of lesser, non-compliant representatives of the boards. Fuck my life.
On a whim, I tried to capitalize on the random nostalgia of the mid-2000s by creating the MyWaste https://trashepics.com/mywaste/ rip-off. Truth be told, I thought MySpace was waaay better than Facebook. It allowed customization of one's profile page to create a unique page for users, but seeing as how most people didn't understand how HTML and CSS worked, that caved in on itself because MySpace couldn't fathom those contigencies. That's when you'd see people's profile pages that had WAY too many pictures and conflicting elements that caused pages to load forever, as well as scroll sideways for miles. (Ironically, MySpace thought it would be good to make page layouts automatically scroll sideways, and they fell off the face of the earth after that stupid idea).
So yeah... Nobody took to the idea of MyWaste either. Oh boy... So when we lost a cluster of our best users... to goddamn FREEFORUMS, no less... Holy fucking hell, did that piss me off! We ain't living in the 2000s anymore! TE has more capabilities than that, but they left nonetheless, so in a spiteful effort, I ripped off the look of their shitty FreeForums site for FleaForums https://trashepics.com/app/ff/. Clearly, our userbase was already too fargone for that to matter, so I began to sink into a further depression...
Shortly after this clusterfuck, I figured... why not try my hand at Facebook? Oh, what a grueling task it has been...
I tried dissecting the sourcecode of Facebook to make one great big farce of it, but it's proven to be an arduous effort that has nearly cost me my sanity.
Jesus Christ, does facebook overcomplicate the ever-loving HELL out of their code! I looked at their code and thought I'd be able to emulate it in a couple of days. Boy, was I wrong. It's taken me MONTHS to wrap my head around it, and I'm not even halfway there. I tried to make a TE skin for Facebook, as a means of potential new users having that familiarity to make the transition here as easy as can be, but I still haven't worked out all the kinks. Sure, I've been so busy with work, relationships, and simply trying to eat enough that I don't starve, but GOD DAMN! Why is facebook so complicated?!!!
If anyone is curious, I haven't gotten very far in it, but here's my effort for the Farcebook https://trashepics.com/app/fb/ skin on TE. There are a LOT of holes I have yet to fill in, but there's a vague desktop AND mobile presence to it. Learning how fb operates has taught me a few things, and is why we have the notification system. I'm trying to fathom how the comment system works, and that's also given me a few ideas on how to streamline the TE experience, as well as a boatload of headaches.
Looking at their source code, it's a goddamn miracle that Facebook can even load, because those dumb bastards call hundreds of scriptsets and stylesheets when you view their page. If this was the 90s, it would take a fucking YEAR for these pages to load, because as I've said, facebook is an overcomplicated mess, and I've been trying for MONTHS to get this skin working, and it's barely halfway there.
My God... how stressful this has been, and I don't even have much to show for it. I've been struggling for weeks trying to wrap my head around the comment system, as well as the seemingly infinite amount of conflicting stylesheets it presents that end up making each page visit use about a megabyte of data, which is GODAWFUL. I'm seriously surprised FB loads as fast as it does, because the code for it makes me sick to my stomach just looking at it. It's just bad, bad, BAD!
And what stresses me out even more is that this skin isn't even the only thing I'm working on. I'm still trying to restore Johan's old posts, while trying to update our markup system to be dynamic, among about a dozen other things.
So stressful this has been, and I haven't even gotten to user profiles yet. Sometimes, I wonder why I bother, but sometimes... when I'm drunk and high enough... I can look beyond my own self-pity to remember all the great ideas I have yet to tackle... Ideas for content, media, literature, and so much else that my brain just begins to melt when I think of how little time I have to do any of it.
I love horror, and I love trash. One of these years, I might be able to express myself in a way that people might actually see the filth that I've been dreaming about all my life. Some day, I hope...
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