User blog:Tower12346/My Episode Guide Project

So I’ve been working on this project since August, and haven’t really presented it to many people because I was a bit unsure of whether or not it was actually good. Well, it’s been about 2 months since then and now that I’m not as emotionally invested into this anymore I suppose I’ll present it just so I can say that I have. You never know if you never try.

Besides, anybody can look at my Sandbox anyway, so I don’t even know how many people already know about it. Oh well.

Part 1
So my project focused primarily on a modification to the Episodes template/module that was originally created by Noreplyz (I think). Here is the current version.

So the current version is actually somewhat modified from the original version. The original version had also included links to the videos in the old Yogscast.com website. Once Yogscast.com had been overhauled we got rid of it since video pages no longer existed there.

If you expand the episode guide, you can see that there is a header for video names and for the Youtube logo. The Youtube logo used to be necessary for there to be a distinction between the Youtube links and the Yogscast.com links but that is no longer is a thing. There is also a feature where the Youtube logo links to the channel page where the video is uploaded to. I don’t know about anybody else, but to me this is not clear at all unless you're specifically looking for it. Implementing it is also a bit of a pain, since you have to input the channel id yourself. This is the first problem.

The second problem is a bit of a quality of life one, but in pages where there are a lot of episode guides, they all look exactly the same aesthetically and thus takes a few seconds to find the one you want. I don't think anyone else has this problem but I might as well add it in.

Part 2
So I have attempted to fix all those problems and you can tell me how it looks.

The first thing that may come to mind is that it looks remarkably similar to the template I put on the Past Members page. That’s because that template was based off of this one.

The most prominent difference is the channel logo in the left side of the title header thing. That simultaneously removes the Youtube logo and the aesthetic similarities in a single stroke (or so I feel). For now the logo links to the user/channel wiki page but TAvatars now has functionality to link to external pages, so if it is necessary I can change it so it links to the channel Youtube page just like the Youtube logo did before. Either way you no longer have to search for the channel id yourself because TAvatars links it for you.

I also removed the entire header for the episode guides, which you can see if you expand it. I think it looks fine and that anybody can tell that the video names are the video names and that the links link to Youtube, but if there are any concerns about it I can work it out.

You can see the Hearthstone page converted with my Episode guide in my Sandbox. It's probably slightly outdated, but it works as a proof of concept.

Part 3
The most prominent counterargument I can think of is redundancy. “The Avatars are already used in the infoboxes, and the channel name is already right there! There is no need for these logo things!”

Well, in my opinion, redundancy isn’t too much of a problem. If it bothers people too much I can remove the name showing up when you hover over the logo (or I least I hope I can, I’ve never tried). That gets rid of redundancy for the channel titles, but that seems a little excessive to me.

Even though the Avatars are in the infobox, that doesn’t address the issue that the episode guides look aesthetically similar to each other, so that’s my stance.

Plus, I think a little redundancy is a good thing. We still have people asking what modpack each series is using about once every 2 weeks now even though they’ve been on the page since their creation.

Conclusion
So that’s my project. I didn’t really want to upload all this to Discord because this would take up a lot of space and I felt like I wanted to say a lot about this. I don’t even know if Discord has a character limit. oh well.

Also thanks to Noreplyz for helping out with the CSS during that one time a while ago.