What's new? (November)
Little big changes to pkmn.help! A curated links page. And my head is full of TV static.
pkmn.help
I guess I spent… a lot of time working on pkmn.help this month. I got some feedback emails that reminded me to be careful when making large scale site changes. Most people were nice enough about it, though.
Dual-type offense calculator
A fan suggested this one to me. The existing single-type offense calculator may look nice and simple, but it’s not very realistic.
New layout
Nobody asked me for this, but I’d personally been very tired of the haphazard site organization. I caused some panic by replacing the one-tap navigation with a hamburger menu, though. And, honestly, fair. Nobody likes when their workflows take more steps. So I designed a tab bar for the top 5 pages and released that. In order to get this done, I added the amazing Lucide icon pack to my site. It’s open source and very developer friendly. The stroked style looks pretty good, too. The 24x24 size with 2px stroke feels a little big for some of my use cases, but scaling them down to a 16x16 icon with 1.5px stroke matched my old icons pretty well.
I’m not generally a fan of “icon only navigation”, but I think the users of pkmn.help spend so much time here that they will get the hang of it quickly. Plus, the hamburger menu icons reinforce the meaning of the tab bar icons.
Oh, I also switched from the site being named “Pokémon Type Calculator” to being named “pkmn.help”. That’s the domain name, and it’s short and sweet! “Pokémon Type Calculator” was always a description, not a title. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense to translate the title into every language too. So now there’s a clear distinction between the site name and its description.
Maybe eventually I’ll get around to making a real home page for the site… haha.
Team defense results table
I’ve been unhappy with the visual appearance of the team defense results table for a long time. It was space inefficient, hard to focus on the right details, and just kind of ugly.
I changed the large square table cells with thin borders to small rectangular table cells with slightly rounded borders and a 2px gap between them. Along with the new small ghost badge, everything lines up perfectly now. And most importantly, the information I want to stand out, actually stands out more now! The eye is drawn to brighter colors, after all.
A new links page
My links page now has a ton of curated links on it! It’s organized and includes descriptions. Hopefully you can have fun checking out the things I wanted to share :)
I also tried to make a lightbox image viewer, but it’s kind of a huge pain. I ended up going with something that opens the image in the browser directly when you click them.
Other stuff
We went furniture shopping! We’ll get our new chairs this week. I’m super excited about them.
We spent the day before Thanksgiving with family, and Thanksgiving day hosting a Friendsgiving :)
Oh, and our power went out twice. Super annoying!
This month has been a blur
I honestly can barely remember what I did this month. I guess I spent a lot of time watching Ash play The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-. It’s still good, but boy is it massive.
I mentioned last month that my “next” games would be NINJA GAIDEN 4 and Shin Megami Tensei IV… but I somehow haven’t even started those.
I did buy Kirby Air Riders, but I don’t like it as much as I hoped I would. Maybe I’ll write a review for it after I’ve spent more time with it.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time working on pkmn.help recently. I’m proud of the changes, but it’s been a bit exhausting. I have a tendency to stay up till midnight or later working on it.
Hopefully I’ll actually get back to reading and gaming in full force in December. I think my body needs it.