Sandbox

Sandbox is the traditional name for a testing page that’s being used for Proof-of-Concept.

For the development of this Elven Pathways Fansite, here’s my iterative programming enviornment:

  • The Elvenar forum and Discourse, for both Beta and a few Production Worlds, to discover and explore interesting ideas that other folks have suggested.

  • The Elvenar wiki to get a semi-official version of what’s already been published.

  • My own inworld tests, including Beta, to try out various strategies.

  • VSCode, using the Codeswing extension for HTML, javascript, and CSS.

  • I use an AVG Internet Security version of Google Chrome for most of my research, but Microsoft Edge is a bit better for digging out coding examples.

  • Squarespace for the creation of the actual website, including this Sandbox.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a nice environment for putting together a website, but it does not provide an automatic reversion capability, other than a useful redo key while a block is still in edit mode.

There is, however, an easy way to make a copy of your entire website, but the copy is only retained for fourteen days. It’s not a reversion copy, but it’s nice to have have a backup copy if you accidently destroyed something when you were just trying to rearrange things.

Most of your development has to use a desktop browser, which provides an nx24 cell grid for the alignment of the various blocks. You can then switch to a mobile environment, which will be 3nx8, to optimize the website for mobile use. The mobile instance supports mild editing, and you can resize some of the blocks, but you can’t make any major structural changes.

Another feature is the ability to move individual block up or down in a column, by using arrow keys to rearrange them.

You can also group several adjacent blocks, and then drag them around as a group, or programmatically align the grouped elements in various ways.

Codeswing

Codeswing for HTML (and text), Javascript, and CSS, is a nice programming environment that provides a Webpage Screen, along with all of the normal hints and shortcuts that are available in a professional code development environment.

IMPORTANTLY, you can use Google’s MyDrive or Microsoft’s OneDrive to automatically back up your work.

You may have to rebuild a webpage if you accidently destroy it, but you’ll still have the contents available.