Monthly Review: February 2023

Its two weeks into March, you thought I’d forgotten about February’s Monthly Review? WELL YOU’RE WRONG. IT’S HERE. A ✨FRESH✨ MONTHLY REVIEW!

While compiling this list, I was genuinely impressed with how much I actually got done in a month that has the shortest amount of days! All of my January goals were successfully completed, along with some bonus spur-of-the-moment projects because when inspiration strikes at 10PM, I have no impulse control 😝

So let’s jump into it, the Monthly Review for February 2023!

SullyGnome Stats

I avoid spending too much energy looking at stats like follower counts since this is out of my control, but I do still do enjoy keeping track of this and being open about my streaming journey!

Twitch Bot

Looking back, I had pretty lofty goals for Koishibot: “I will get a bot up by the end of December, starting off the New Year fresh!” – except I didn’t have a functioning application and went on holiday 🙈”With the help of BraveCobra to plan a design pattern, surely it’ll be done by the end of January!” – but while I was able to re-implement the Twitch connection, there was no logic for the Attendance module 😅

So imagine my surprise on the VERY last day of February, I finally announced that I would be running a MVP of Koishibot, with the functioning Attendance count/streaks at the start of March! 🎊Sureeee I had to power through one weekend to get the logic running and that there is plenty I can refactor but it wor- ..well, aside from one crash that happens at the start, it works! 😂

And now it should be smooth sailing, implementing ALL THE FEATURES! Well, hopefully its smooth sailing LOL

Tiny Tools

While my main goal of learning how to code was to make a Twitch Bot, I realized I can now create all the programs that I wish existed for my very specific use cases! The joys of automation and making my life easier! ..Ignoring the fact it took me way longer to code them than time I’m actually saving, it’s valuable coding experience! In February I made not just one, but TWO, little tools that I uploaded to Github!

The first tool, WP Embed TTV Clip, was coded in a night after I was tired of manually modifying Twitch’s embed code to display clips on my site. It converts various versions of clip URLs into code snippets for WordPress – my favorite bit is where it takes the URL from the clipboard and copies code back into the clipboard. Less clicks! 😏

The second tool, Image Crop Resize, was coded shortly after. I was tired of using a Photoshop template to crop images for the site and wondered if it could be made into a tool instead. I thought modifying an image within a program would be a lot of work, but I was pleasantly surprised at how straight forward it was with the help of Microsoft libraries.

There are three presets that you can manually input x & y values to crop from, as well as setting a resize width & height value. With a click of a button, it takes a screenshot from the clipboard, trims, resizes, and copies the new image back into the clipboard! As you can see, it’s my favorite shortcut haha.

The code for this tool isn’t very clean and I had to shelve a “draw crop” feature because it required more planning than I anticipated, but it works for what I need! Perhaps I’ll revisit it in the future and code it in WPF to see how far I’ve improved 😁

HonestDan’s WordPress Theme

After “finishing” my WordPress theme, I was eager take on another theme project so I told Dan he’s getting a site done as a Valentine’s Day gift 😘 Aren’t I thoughtful? LOL

He supplied a sketch of a layout he wanted (look at that cute little pro pic!) and I did my best to create a theme that matched. There was lots of back and forth regarding the design and color choice but in the end… the client has the final say _{even if I had other thoughts} 🤣

Since his theme includes a sidebar, I got to learn about widgets and how display/hide them on various view port sizes. I also gained a better understanding of CSS.. while also realizing I was unnecessarily naming div class in my own theme and over complicating things LOL.

One thing that I’m slowly starting to loath is Bootstrap and how difficult overriding values are. After spending a bit of time trying to resize and center thumbnail cards for his games page, I’m thinking I may try to redo our themes without the use of Bootstrap. A PROJECT FOR ANOTHER TIME.

I still have a few things I need to adjust (like those cards!!), but hoping we can have his site up and running by the end of March

Website Updates

For my own website, I added a few new pages:

Snail Dandle Stories: Little short stories written by TheBookSnail based on the Dandle guesses that started with the word snail.
KoishiBot: An explanation for the Twitch Bot, along with a list of planned features.
Coding FAQ: For all the frequently asked questions I get on stream about coding.
Website Todo List: A little reminder of myself for pages/posts I’d like to make for the site.

Stream Summaries

Last month I had the goal of writing all my stream summaries on the website instead of Discord, and I stuck to that commitment! 🥳 I’ve gotten several compliments on Stream Summaries – many people appreciated having something to read to catch up on what happened during the stream. If you’re a streamer yourself, consider doing these for your own community! 😀

Looking at the summary archive page, I think I’d like to have the posts grouped by Month and definitely add some pagination if I don’t end up implementing lazy loading.

For March I’d like to tackle two main projects:

– Get the Raid feature working on Koishibot
– Upload the two remaining at least one of the last two videos for the Little Nightmares 2 playthrough on Youtube

And that’s a wrap for this monthly review! Thanks for reading kois, looking forward to checking back in at the end of the month!