pinniped.page logo

Projects

Blog

About

pinniped.page/about

WEBSITE STATUS  
GIVE FEEDBACK  
DISCORD SERVER  

Hey there! Welcome to my website, I’m so glad you stopped by. Around here I go by Obsidian_Seal, enjoyer of — among other things — programming, graphic design, typography, transportation, puzzles, games, and LEGO. You’ll find all that and more, right here on THE PINNIPED PAGE: a collection of boredom-busting games, useful tools, and other random thoughts or fun ideas.

This website was first deployed to the internet on November 28th, 2020. Over the years I have slowly added more and more, turning it into something I’m truly proud of.

why “Obsidian_Seal”

Back in 2017, when I created my Minecraft account, I combined those two words into what I believe is a worthy username. Since then, I have used it nearly everywhere, and I hope to continue using it forever.

Seals have been my favourite animals for as long as I can remember, so I wanted to include them in my username. Then, if I recall correctly, I wanted something from Minecraft as the first word and I decided that obsidian sounded best.

While we’re talking about Minecraft, I should mention that this website’s logo (the seal face, below) is from the Minecraft skin that I have been using since I designed it in 2018.

the pinniped.page logo

why “pinniped.page”

The word “pinniped” collectively refers to seals, sea lions, and walruses, all of which are technically seals, my favourite animals. All the good seal domains were either taken or way outside my budget, so I looked instead for domains that used the word pinniped. The one I chose (pinniped.page) was short, relatively inexpensive, and best of all, alliterative. The only downside is that people don’t know how to spell it and aren’t familiar with .page domains. Hopefully this can be rectified!

a seal’s head, barely visible in a body of water (own work)

how it’s made

I wrote a pretty detailed blog post about everything that goes on behind-the-scenes around here. You should go read it.

cookies & privacy policy

There are no cookies on the pinniped.page and I collect no information about visitors. Please do not enter any personal information into any form fields as data is not saved securely. If you have any questions about this, please click on the first button at the bottom of this page.

design system

You should be able to tell which pages use the main.css stylesheet because they look very similar to this one. Great effort has been put into making the pinniped.page unique, elegant, and consistent across all of its many pages. However, because I use Google Chrome to work on my website, some things may look completely different in other web browsers. Explained below are some parts of the main website’s design.

COLOUR
The colour palette I use was originally generated by Coolors, but I have expanded it with lighter shades of each colour. The three accent colours are used to make the three sections of the pinniped.page distinct. Project-related pages have teal accents, blog-related pages use red accents, and the information trilogy (about, status, and contact) uses yellow accents. Any page can, however, use any colour for emphasis, like how the status page uses teal and red to represent good and bad.

the pinniped.page’s colour palette

TYPOGRAPHY
Abril Fatface for headings and Roboto Slab for body text. They’re awesome, no further discussion necessary.

The width (measure) of blocks of text (like this one) was determined to provide the best readability.

ICONS
Speaking of awesome, Font Awesome! I use their icons everywhere because I love how they look and because I paid for pro and need to get my money’s worth. But seriously, they are incredibly useful.

RIGIDITY
This is a bit difficult to explain. Some websites give me the sense that the elements on the page aren’t fully attached, like they might disappear or break at any moment. Perhaps it’s an unusual hover effect, strange alignment, visual inconsistency, or weird movement. Perhaps I’m just crazy. But I can guarantee there will be none of that here! All the elements on the pinniped.page are carefully crafted and firmly affixed.

connections

where to go next

Below are descriptions of the main pages on my website.

HOME
The landing page is a nice quiet space to contemplate life. Reload for random subtitles.

PROJECTS
This page is a frequently-updated list of several featured projects. Also present is a search field, “random project” button, and access to the complete list of projects.

PROJECTS+
This page has the complete list of projects on my website, in alphabetical order, as well as the search field and “random project” button from the main projects page.

BLOG
Here you can find the eight most recent blog posts and a button that takes you to the rest.

BLOG+
The rest of the blog posts are listed here.

ABOUT
You’re looking at it right now! And yes, the icons along the sides (you need a big screen to see them) are randomly picked and randomly placed in a grid. If they’re too weird, just reload.

STATUS
Visit this page to monitor the status of services used and provided by my website. Known issues and notices of upcoming or ongoing maintenance are listed here.

The percentage at the top of the page approximates how many services are working by way of a points system. Fully operational services get one point, services with minor issues get half a point, and services that are unavailable or have major issues get no points. The sum of the points is divided by the total number of listed services, then displayed as a percentage. Below that big number is a button to compare my status page with dozens of others.

CONTACT
If neither the about page nor the status page have what you’re looking for, the contact page provides a way to message me directly. Responses, if necessary, are through Discord and not guaranteed.

thanks for reading!!

QUESTIONS?  
READ OLD VERSION  
LAST UPDATED: September 3rd, 2024