project in detail

Project in Detail: Fuse Bead Color Matcher

Submitted by Josh on

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of Perler Beads, both in terms of making new designs and in sorting out some of our myriad colors that got mixed together.

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe 25th Anniversary Logo

Submitted by Josh on
As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history.

A Change of Direction

Project in Detail: Caves of Narshe Logo Redesign (Part 1)

Submitted by Josh on

This is the first "Project in Detail" blog I've done about something that wasn't either explicitly web code, or heavily web code with some design enhancement along the way. This time around, I'm documenting the process involved in revamping the logo for Caves of Narshe to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary (on July 31, 2017).

The New Alvies.org, Part Two

Submitted by Josh on

In this second post discussing the current design of the website you're on as you read this, I go more into detail about how I drew out the art assets for alvies.org and built it all to go together. Of course, by the time you're reading this, the technical details are out of date, but I probably won't write much more about that.

The New Alvies.org, Part One

Submitted by Josh on

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale.

Project in Detail: CoN World Cup

Submitted by Josh on

I've been a soccer player for the vast majority of my life, but my path to being a soccer fan was a slower one. That's something for some other blog, probably. But over at the Caves of Narshe, still my primary online community, there have been over the years a lot of folks who have been soccer fans just like me, and a fair amount of banter around the Beautiful Game, as they say.

Project in Detail: Mobile Caves of Narshe

Submitted by Josh on
As most of the web development for the Caves of Narshe is a one-man operation, I admit that the site can be slow to adapt to trends. Most recently, that trend has been responsive web, which is particularly annoying given that the site's core competency, video game information and walkthroughs, lends itself extremely well to use on a mobile device. Most games now are played with the user either on the mobile device itself, or with the phone or tablet sitting next to them as they play from the couch.

Project in Detail: The Kegatron

Submitted by Josh on

The "Arkeg" is, as you might be able to suss out if you think long enough, a combination of a stand-up arcade game cabinet plus a "kegerator," another portmanteau describing a mini-fridge with a small keg of beer inside. This is, in fact, a real thing, and it's one that will set you back roughly four thousand dollars. But not the one you'll read about here!