Minnow's first site: toejamandearl

In late March I set up a webpage for Minnow, toejamandearl. The name comes from ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove! on Nintendo Switch, a game we actually haven't played all that much but evidently left an impression. The site is 100% to a 7-year-old’s design specifications. I occasionally make a technical suggestion but I don’t ever try to influence the aesthetic in any way.

Every few weeks we will go emoji hunting. For my personal convenience, I recently relegated this to Slackmoji so I could teach them how to use search functions but we used to plunder various kaoani collections. I included a list of sites we pilfered at the bottom of the page.

I have a one-liner I use to convert everything we downloaded into a list of img tags that can be plopped into the index.html. Thanks to this updating the site only takes about five minutes.

  for %i in (*.*) do echo ^<img id="icon" src="/kaoani/%i" alt="%~ni" title="%i" /^> >> images.html

One of the first things they requested was a hit counter. I have no idea how they even knew what a hit counter was. I haven’t used hit counters since the early 2000’s and was wary about setting up some dubious offsite counter. Fortunately, 's Native Neocities Hit Counter offered a handy solution. (See also: 's How to Display Last Updated and Visitor Number Statistics on Neocities)

Sometimes Minnow will pull the site up on tablet and revel in their domain. Observing and counting the emoji collection seems to give them great joy. I suggested creating extra pages so they could display their art and stories, but right now they’re just interested in hoarding emoji. As of this writing, they’ve had over 500 hits which they take great delight in.