i built a website. rebuilt it, actually.

k3y.co is the second iteration on the initial website project i created back in 2023, meant to be feaster by utilizing Go (a programming language) and the more advanced features of PocketBase, rather than relying on the JS extensions like I had been.

the initial inspiration for this entire project, all the way back to version 1.0, had two primary problems in mind it was looking to address:

• the internet is moving towards heavier and heavier censorship
• there are no websites that allow you to host webgames without forcing you to use certain engines and tools

when it came to version 2.0, however, i have to admit that i have no idea what problem i was actually trying to solve. i just knew there was a problem, somewhere, and i needed it solved.

at the start of 2025, after failing to get employed for multiple weeks in a row, i finally caved and decided to pull out a loan that i would pay back using the income from my commissions. this was following what had been several months of non-stop drawing, quite literally daily, and i was looking for essentially any lifeline i could grasp. retrospectively, it was obvious this would only work in the short term, and create the terms for the financial disaster the following month. maybe i knew that. i don't know.

so we then look at the queue, mountain that it is, and it seems insurmountable. i decided to finally close my comms completely, and just bite the bullet. eat less, go out less, do less. spend as little money as possible, and just work down the mountain.

it didn't matter. it didn't work, and it got worse.

i lost a friend i thought i was close with. i lost my neighbor. i lost my house. i lost all the money in my bank account.

i lost the last decade of my life.

it took everything in me to not kill myself, on some days. it felt like i had lost any sense of direction or purpose i had, finding myself quite literally back at square one.

what was i talking about again?

oh right, a website! i built a website. rebuilt it, actually.

...why, again?

i couldn't tell you why i started it. i couldn't tell you why it felt so important to finish it, either. i just knew that i needed to.

however, i can say this much: i knew i wanted big, chunky buttons.

people on the old internet would make random websites for their personal whatever-the-fuck, and add all these random and weird features just because they could. so, with the redesign, i wanted to capture that as much as i could. i tried to keep everything intentionally very "old" feeling, because something about big, chunky buttons just BEGS you to press them.

some other notable changes:

• overhauled site layout and design.
• new query functions added.
• new archive functions added.
• heatmap and global work log added to projects page.
• project pagination added to projects page.
• queue pagination added to projects page.
• image manipulator added to post page.
• image png converter added to post page.
• mass file downloader added to post page.
• video player added to post page.
• audio visualizer added to post page.
• projects pipeline added to post page.
• social media crosslinks added to post page.
• likes added to post page.
• anonymous comments added to post page.
• tripcodes and nicknames added to comments.
• early access code entry added to post page.
• heavy edits to the admin panel that literally no one but i will see lmao.
• added page mumbo jumbo
• cookie manager added.
• terms of service and privacy policy added.
• added comment formatting guide.
• moved "cheatsheet" to search.
• merged "queue" and "projects" into projects
• removed page "gallery"
• replaced page "support"
• removed substar connection

as you can tell, the site has been done now since before this post-mortem. i've already gone back to drawing, and i feel better than before. but i don't think i would feel this in the groove had it not been for the time i've taken to build this stupid, janky, held-together-with-twigs-and-glue piece of shit website.

perhaps it's as tolstoy wrote in Confession -- there is no escape for thinking creatures against the endless suffering of the world except by faith. maybe it was just a simple act of faith that said that i needed to prove to myself i was capable of finishing something, something large, without failing at it. that my hardwork and effort, when applied, DO produce results, and i AM capable of doing something other than failing.

perhaps i was just burnt out from drawing furry ass nearly every day for two years.

that debate can be left to minds smarter than i.

for me, this is over. i am at peace.

not fuckin great, honestly.

but hey, the website's done!

soon

no

under construction still!

has been a very shockingly busy few weeks since i first announced i was gonna drop it, so it's been delayed quite a bit. fret not, though! it'll be out soon!

substar members will also get early access to it as soon as it's done. sooooo...

currently, the answer is no.

someone in the past wanted to give more than the $20 as a one-time thing, so i made that tier and just sorta kept it.

if you can think of something worth $50, i'm more than happy to hear it, though.

i do, indeed.

no

thank you much!

it was a long time to get it lookin' good enough for public use, so i'm glad >someone likes it.

i'm not 100% certain what you mean by that.

if you're asking how you view content that's blacklisted in the gallery (let's say gore, hypothetically), you would include it by adding

to your search.

a full list of blacklisted tags is available at the bottom of search help.

it's usually safe to assume that if i don't ever get in touch, i probably was not interested in the comm presented.

but, you never know. my mood changes enough that what i didn't say yes to last time i might accept on follow-up.

if u kno, u kno.

a mercifully short update for this month.

still working on finishing comms. still working on the mae project.

rather than force people to wait any longer, i will be re-opening polls this month. new poll will run august 5th through august 9th, and i'll figured all that stuff out from there.

started a game jam this month also in my server, for anyone interested in that sorta thing.

overall though, nothing super new to report! hopefully just some more content coming your way.

ribbit. 🐸

unhelpful answer, but it very much depends on the complexity of the background or alt. you'd need to submit a request to get more specific than that.

i'm sitting here writing this while taking a break from a commission i'm currently working on. figured i might as well get it out of the way, get everyone up to speed on what's happening.

the last month has proven to be busier in my real life than i would've thought. nothing particularly tragic, thankfully, but it's put me quite considerably further behind schedule than i would've liked.

so, the month of july's focus will be the following:

• >cleaning up the queue (!!!)
• finishing the mae borowski comic from the polls
• putting out more 'normal' artwork

with that in mind, i would like to thank everyone who is currently supporting me on subscribestar with gracious thanks. already it's grown to a whole $50 a month, meaning that i can basically keep this website up for free! hopefully with that in tow, i'll be able to use it for more things like the neko puncher project.

in terms of polls, i stated i would reopen one a month starting this month, and i meant it -- i'll plan on having one up on the 15th, and then just sorta play by ear. also intend to start knocking off some of those askbox questions, so look forward to that soon!

think that's it.

ribbit. 🐸

meowdy! so, this now constitutes the first full, actual month of successful launch. very much want to thank everyone for their continued support thus far!

couple of things on the agenda --

first, i'll be reopening comms once i have a few more sketches taken care of. at present, the queue is a bit bulky, so i wanna trim that down so that i might best be able to keep up with everything. that said, if you'd like to go ahead and submit something, i'm definitely fielding offers!

second, due to the scope of the last poll image expanding by quite a bit, there will not be a poll this month -- rather, i'll be working towards finishing this one, and every "stage" of development for it, i'll post an update.

just so it's clear what i'm working on -- i'll be making a little animated sequence featuring mae and bea's dad. it should be a lot of fun. :B

i'll likely also be adding an update to the site to make things like this update more apparent, probably to the home page and to the support page.

that's all i can think of for the time being.

ribbit.

fixed it.

the issue was that it was only working on posts with multiple images, because of how i chose to query for things. my bad.

for >TOO LONG have the poor users of k3y.co suffered in SILENCE at the BEHEST of the WEBP MENACE.

>TOO LONG have they needed to MANUALLY CONVERT webp files to their beloved png!

well >NO LONGER

as of now, all images will automatically convert to PNG files before being rendered to the user!

you are welcome.

right click on the image, and it will automatically convert it to a png.

webp is a much smaller file size, and is much less resource intensive, while offering the same resolution as png. i realize everyone relentlessly hates on this format, but at 10x smaller than a png, it's really fucking good for galleries.

i do quite genuinely wish that file browsers would just natively support the format, because honestly, it's one of the better image formats around. it's literally like webms, which no one has an issue with because support hasn't taken THIS LONG to catch.

INTRODUCTION

for my own peace of mind, i decided very last minute that i wanted to write a sort of "postmortem" for the development of this website. it's taken a very large amount of my time this month, and it feels right to me that i should really try to sit down and parse what exactly it was i learned from this experience, and potentially, what i might pass on to someone who would ask me about making their own site.

so let's start with the most obvious.

was this worth it?

i really don't fucking know.

WHAT WAS EVEN THE POINT?

the entire point of this project was to create a "permanent" base for myself where i couldn't be banned, and then, upon seeing that SubscribeStar (a website you should subscribe to me on :) ) had a working API that i could plug in, i just couldn't help myself. what better use for my time is there than creating a little spot where people can not only SEE my website, but can also vote on polls, leave comments, and see early access stuff?

WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG?

the original launch date for this update was meant to be march 9th of 2024.

as you can see by the date of THIS post, that absolutely did not get met.

but why? what actually went wrong?

well it's very simple. i'm working with subscribestar's API. it was for the purpose of connecting with clients. and fuck, while i'm at it, why don't i add an askbox? then people can send requests. it'll be like old tumblr stuff!! and actually, twitter and aethy have APIs too. maybe i should plug those in, so i can post to those websites all at once. ooh, and what if i--

you get the point.

THE ACTUAL WORK

the entire website is designed using pocketbase as it's backend. i'm not much of a GO developer, so i opted to instead just make use of the JS extensions and library that had been written for it. and i have to say, it's incredibly well put together, and does basically everything you would need it to.

one thing i learned, however, was that the API rules slow down the server signifigantly. the work around to this was actually pretty straight forward -- just make everyone use a route that you filter, and you don't actually NEED API rules, and in fact, can just set them to all be "admin only", meaning there's no actual way to use the API except through your site itself. has helped a lot with security, i must say.

specific things were giving me trouble -- for instance, using twitter's API in it's entirety. (which, by the way, if you're reading this and happened to be watching my account at the time i was spamming myself to test it, i do very much apologize.) you don't truly appreciate how much you love reading documentation until you get hit with twitter's lack thereof.

the number of 404 pages on this website is fucking shameful.

the ONLY reason that my twitter plugin works is because i finally just threw out any attempts to do this in JS, and instead opted to write a script in python which performs these tasks for me, going on the intervals set by the JS code. it works like a charm, too, though i admit, i'm not a fan of python, so needing to rely on it irked me a bit. at some point, i do want to try rust, but that's probably for another time.

there was a point where i decided i needed to refactor the code. a lot of it was slow, and full of bloat, but i was concerned greatly that taking the time to do this would result in a full re-write, which could take just as long to write as it did the first time!

as it turns out, it DID require a full rewrite -- but that rewrite took a mere 5 hours. 2 weeks of effort, crunched down into 5 hours. this revelation sorta gutted me a little bit -- what i had been doing up to that point was completely useless. i was losing all of this time, all of this sleep, and it was my own fault.

so, to no one's suprise, the remaining necessary fixes only needed to happen over the course of the next two days. pushing the site came with a small share of bugs, but they were mostly patched as i went.

SO WHAT DID WE LEARN?

for the course of two weeks, including the two weeks where i didn't have my objectives categorized and written out, i spent several nights awake, long into the early hours of the morning, working on this thing.

looking back at it, that was not worth it; the work being done was a lot, but i could've absolutely parsed it out more efficently over a longer period of time, and i absolutely could've stuck working on commissions in between it.

this thing spiraled way out of control, and feature creep set in very early on. this was entirely my own fault -- i did not set up an actual, dedicated plan for the site until nearly the very end. for someone with a degree in project management, it's more than a little stupid that it never even crossed my mind to make that happen.

because of the need to create a dedicated tracker that i could easily access and parse over, i was able to really, truly make use of two tools i had developed in the past -- a tasktracker, which actively monitors what applications i'm using, and a checklist app, which does basically exactly that. they're very basic, and other tools like it exist, but something about the fact i made them really helped me focus on stuff. i wish i had thought to be using them sooner -- the final clock on the task tracker was only dedicated towards the last two days, which in the end looked like this:

all of this to say, i will definitely be using these tools in the future. they were incredibly useful towards helping me maintain being productive.

additionally, they inspired the creation of < href="https://k3y.co/queue">the queue, which will help people who get commissions see where they are, as well as how much i have done in specific regards to their work. it also lets me put up small little announcements for what work i'm currently doing, and what time is going into that. hopefully, this will help keep me both transparent and accountable for what i'm putting out.

overall, this experience has taught me that there is a lot of value in being very hyperspecific when you do projects. and by hyperspecific, i mean SPECIFICALLY making a bullet point list with LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE THING you want to do, and doing NOTHING BUT THAT. otherwise you're going to waste a lot of time and effort on shit that doesn't matter.

thank you to people like NotBoogie for specific advice and help with technical aspects of the site. this experience has fucking sucked my dick. but not in a good way, like with teeth. so any help i was able to get is more than a little appreciated.

how do i end this

i hope you liked reading this essay as much as i enjoyed writing it :)