🛠️ Site Credits 🛠️

On this page, you'll find a semi-comprehensive list of the resources that I use/used to develop this website. I have tried to categorize them in a way that makes sense. Let me know if any of the links are ever broken and I will get those fixed. Check back later for more!

Documentation
Fonts
Images/Graphics
Development Tools
Code Editor
Widgets

📚 Documentation 📚

I work in IT, so I usually cut my teeth on new things via reading the boring vendor documentation. I sometimes use YouTube for niche feature tutorials, but I mostly learned all I know through the following sites and the occasional Stack Overflow or Codepen search:

Josh W. Comeau's Blog
Josh Comeau is an absolute genius and an excellent educator. I've learned more about front-end development from his blog than I have anywhere else. I especially love this article about CSS transitions.
MDN Docs
The Mozilla Developer Network documentation is THE webdev [insert religious text of choice here]. They are on the cutting edge of standards and their documentation is beautifully-written and concise.
W3Schools
This is the go-to website for most budding front-end developers from what I have gathered. Their tutorials are easy to understand and taught in effective order. I think they're a bit behind on coding best practices, especially with some of their CSS methods, but it's a good place to learn the basics before moving on to project-based learning.

🩻 Fonts 🩻

Share Tech by Carrois Apostrophe is the sans-serif font you're reading right now. I grabbed a copy of it from Google Fonts.
Input Sans Narrow by David Jonathan Ross is the monotype font I use for displaying code on the site. The font is part of a larger font system called 'Input' which you can purchase on DJR's website.
Yukimura by Mehmet Reha Tuğcu is used in headings found within modal (pop-up) windows on the site. I absolutely love most of Mehmet's fonts; I purchased their Pixel Font Bundle in late 2024, and it included this font.
Rotgut by Mehmet Reha Tuğcu is used in all headings except for those found in modal windows. Again, this font came with the bundle I talked about in the previous bullet point, but I'll link it here as well. I love the different weights of this font; they're stellar. I can't recommend Mehmet's fonts enough!
SH Pinscher Regular by Tinghao Hu is used in the navigation menu on the right. You may download your own copy from Tinghao's 1001Fonts profile. This font is just so well done and easy to read at small point sizes, which is definitely not the case for TRUE bitmap fonts. It even has some emojis and other special characters built in! 🙂

🖼️ Images 🖼️

I obtain most animated .gifs on the site from Gifcities, which is a filename-based .gif search engine provided by the Internet Archive. You can scroll this bad boy for hours and never run out of unhinged images to harvest from other (long-dead) personal websites. I recommend clicking the images in the search results; if you do, then you'll be taken to an archival Wayback Machine snapshot of the source website. It's also a fun scroll to share with friends!
The site icons are from Google's Material icon set. I'd like to move away from these eventually and either make my own or find a better, less corporate set.
The site's background is concept art from Fallout: New Vegas that I dithered using DitherIt, which is a fantastic web-based dithering tool.
Anything else you see (that doesn't show an artists' credit) is my own art that I probably drew on the wife's iPad in Procreate.

🌐 Online DevTools 🌐

Cloud Convert // Font File Conversion
I use this site to convert .TTF and .OTF files to web-compatible .WOFF and .WOFF2 files. I try not to use these gimmicky conversion websites when I can avoid it, but sometimes it's worth saving the headache of doing it yourself.
CodePen // Code Ideas & Sharing
I occasionally use CodePen for testing out development ideas without breaking my projects. This "social media-slash-web-development" site allows you to edit and preview HTML, CSS, and JS all in one window (and in real time), but with the added benefit that it doesn't make your eyes bleed. It's also a good way to find new CSS tricks and inspiration from other users!
EmojiCopy // Copying Emojis to the Clipboard
I use this to copy-paste the emoticons you see all over my website into my code editor. I use this site over the many "emoji selector" copycats because they have a search engine that is actually functional, which saves me a lot of time. Yes, modern emojis aren't very 2000s but I love them and they're so fun! Plus, they look cool with my glowy, scanline overlay.
⭐ Ezgif // The WebDev Swiss Army Knife ⭐
If I could only choose one "indie webdev" tool, it would be Ezgif. This is the holy grail of image conversion and optimization web tools. It translates between common image file types. It crops, compresses, rotates, resizes, and optimizes .gifs. You can even MAKE a .gif out of a stack of pictures, which is not the most straightforward thing to do offline if you don't have a good handle on ImageMagick, Photoshop, or GIMP. It isn't updated too frequently, but it already has a ton of features that work REALLY well. What more can you ask for out of a free tool?
GifRun // Convert Youtube Clips to .gifs
Downloading a Youtube video, editing it, and converting it into a .gif is a pain in the ass and a big time suck no matter which way you look at it. If you survived the Tumblr fandom wars of '14, then you have probably cried over the .gif creation process. This site takes whatever Youtube URL you feed into it and gives you a simple tool to convert it into a .gif, albeit with a hideous and slightly confusing UI. I've tried a couple of similar online services but they were much more limited with their freemium features.

💿 Code Editor 💿

💻 VSCodium
VSCodium is an open-source binary version of Microsoft's ever-popular VSCode code editor. I have tried many other alternatives, but I always come back to this one. It really is powerful, to Microsoft's credit, but I will avoid their telemetry at all costs. I use the following extensions in my VSCodium install:

Gruvbox Theme by jdinhlife - My preferred editing theme on any screen.
HTML CSS Support by Ecmel - Auto-completes "id" and "class" attributes. Not sure why this isn't built into the software at this point.
indent-rainbow by oderwat - This makes it easier for my 1 Perception ass to see what element I'm working in.
Live Preview by ms-vscode - This allows for hosting a local web server within VSCodium. This works well for testing mobile layouts or adding content to a site without needing to see the full-sized layout. I find Firefox's development tools to be quite memory-hungry compared to this one.
Rainbow CSV by mechatroner - This extension enables highlighting within CSV files, which I use a lot for work.
Simple Icons by LaurentTreguier - I don't really like the built-in icon library in VSCodium's UI, so I chose this one on a whim. It's easy to distinguish between them within my gruvbox theme.
XML by redhat - This extension adds XML support to VSCodium. I've been working with .XML files to organize my vast library of bookmarks, so this makes things go a bit smoother when I'm working in those files.

⚙️ Widgets ⚙️

The Salty's Lair guestbook is powered by Atabook, which is an awesome free service brought to you by Nekoweb. I used to use 123Guestbook, but they shut down their servers in 2024. :(
I utilize the free version of Cbox for the chatroom that is embedded into Salty's Lair. The free version is nice, but I wish it'd let you change the CSS without paying for the service. I might switch away from this eventually.
The goofy animated Surf Club embeddable next to the chatbox will take you to the Surf Club webring navigator (if you click the outer "Warp Zone" ring) to see other member sites in the Melonland Surf Club. If you get bored of Salty's Lair, I would definitely check this out!
I use Status.Cafe to embed my most recent update from my site profile.