Just like the last time I hosted 'Tales of the Urban Explorer' - the website, I quickly got bored and abandoned the project.
Unlike the previous time, the most recent incarnation is all my own work and while it may look rough around the edges there's no trace of web-builders, web-designers or fancy front ends to update the content.
It’s all HTML, CSS-Tailwind and the odd bit of Javascript all done the hard way and this is making me pay more attention and not ditch it.
When you get no hits for days, it's hardly an inspiration to add more content, and the presentation while serviceable is not up to professional quality.
It does hit you in the face like a sledgehammer, but when I look at the competition (always designed by those fancy web-builders with their equally unattractive maintenance fees), mine is placed firmly in the shade.
The lack of website hits is due to my reluctance to pay for SEO. It's all a big fucking con and so long as remind myself that I did all for 'for the experience', then it should be OK.
But it’s not enough…
Everyone else simply shows static images, but I offer more than that. Do people not want to read or has the general intelligence level degraded so much that my extremely infrequent visitors are illiterate buffoons and can't see anything beyond visuals?
I signed up sometime last year for some analysis..., free but free means shit analysis.
Occasionally I will get an email telling me how bad my website is. This is wrong, it's got a rating of 67% and you should pay us to make it all better and go away. Don't pay and your score is 0, what a dunce.
...#Robots.txt is there, so stop telling me otherwise you bastards'...
It's all about the money, the money, the money, isn't it?
You can see there have been no updates since August 2024. That’s hardly an inspiration to any new viewer (what new viewers?).
I hosted 121 explores and then realised I was probably wasting my time on an invisible audience. Could further development encourage more users? Not a chance, but it could wake me up to further coding practice.
A few weeks ago, I started meddling with the borders and re-sizing of images, created a copy of the 'industrial.html' but could not figure out if the new look was any better than the old.
Can you give me an opinion? Which one fits your eyes and is more appealing?
...'the new look with borders and horizontal red lines, smaller avatars'...
The borders around the images are an orange colour, should they be different colours depending on the type of exploration, or do the borders look shit and should be canned?
If you think the original is superior then tell me so. It will save me a shit lot of work retrofitting the other pages.
...'the classic look, no borders, no red lines, larger avatars'...
I was also considering writing some type of front-end to aid me in adding new content, and maybe another page to separate where the explores hail from.
I don't mean exactly, but perhaps by county. It's all rinse and repeat code so I can't see this being much of an issue.
I have well over 400 documented explorers and another 70-80 that still need writing up. I would prefer to make the change before the rest of these are added.
That's if I can force myself to add the rest, and retro-fit the older STEEM-based explores from 2018-2019 which have images hosted on the late busy.org servers.
What would you say is missing from this website? More content, I can deal with but what else?
...'@goblinknackers' large yellow balls are a little in your face?, what do you think?'...
@steddyman tells me the images of the explorers connected to every explore are disconcerting and unnecessary. Should they be omitted?
I wanted to create something unlike any other Urban Exploration website, and I feel this is the case, but that doesn’t make it compelling viewing.
...'why else would you want to see this shithole, other than for the used rubbers?'...
The quotes I feel are click-bait and should make the viewer want to click and read the article. I can't track when this happens as these are links to PeakD and Google Analytics only shows me views of individual pages.
I need to either do something with this or let it rotlike the last incarnation.
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My Urban Exploration Tales can be found directly on the internet via my
Website: 'Tales of the Urban Explorer'.
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