Spark Needle
It’s been more than a year since the first time I wrote in this weblog that I wanted to make a website revolving around Volkner and Flint from Pokémon. Today, that website is finally ready. Its name is Spark Needle, and is the largest shrine I’ve ever made.
Writing these lines give me an incredible feeling of accomplishment that can only be compared to the one I got when Angeltower’s Frozen Truth Version was released back in 2007, and it’s also a bit like reliving the day after the first kiss or after the first time making love. It also saddens me a bit that I will no longer have to nurture this website; I think it could be the same feeling a parent gets seeing their children growing up and leaving their house. It’s a mysterious thing.
Putting aside this emotional stuff for a moment, I can say that Spark Needle is my biggest feat yet, both on the personal and technical front.
With the death of Internet Explorer 6, the web is finally ready to bestow the true potential of PNG transparency and fixed backgrounds applied to elements other than <body>. Spark Needle’s layout features four types of fixed tiled backgrounds with the same pattern in different colors; when scrolling the page, the eye is tricked into believing the background is always the same with only the colors changing. The top looks very simple, but it features scrolling elements on a fixed background, and this is where trasparent-background PNGs come into play. The text on the navigation buttons has a trasparent background as well, and the hovers are pure CSS: there is no other part of the image, it’s just the background color changing into red. This makes the layout lighter and the coding cleaner.
For what concerns the content, the fact that there are 21 information pages should say everything. If gedit isn’t failing me, the total word count for all of these pages is around 14,000, and I was being concise. Other than a lot to read, there are also game pictures, artworks and screencaps from the anime. 308 screencaps, to be precise. Scary, I know.
Most of the fanstuff section has content you should have already seen if you’ve been following this weblog, but there are also some new things: two unpublished fan arts - which would be the suggestive fan arts I was talking about in my last artwork post, mind -, one short fan fic which is really about their friendship so you have no excuse not to read it, and 13 icons I made yesterday. There is also some submitted material :D
and now I can sit on my butt and feel accomplished.
