Another kind of technical upgrade: something that has been bugging me for a little while now is that the site's URLs since I rewrote the backend in Python in 2016 have been a little nonstandard. The FAQ, for example, was at https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq, but if you went to https://www.dragonflycave.com/faq/ - which is a more common way for URLs to look if they don't end in a file extension - you'd get a 404 page. My own Firefox's address bar was sometimes automatically adding a slash when I manually entered a URL without it, meaning it would direct me to the 404 page instead of the actual page I wanted. All in all, it was just a bit odd that it worked that way - and it wasn't 100% consistent either, since there were some URLs that did end in slashes.

Long story short, I have now made it so that the site's URLs should always end in a slash if they don't end in a file extension. The slash-less version will seamlessly redirect to the version with the slash, so hopefully you shouldn't notice much of a change.

Alongside this, for boring technical reasons, I also updated a large number of links to other pages across the site, where I was still linking to old pre-2016 .aspx URLs. These URLs already seamlessly redirected to the new URLs for those pages (and they still do), but I'd meant to get all of those updated to link the actual new URLs instead of the redirect soon after the Python migration, and then it only ever happened for a few scattered pages when I happened to be updating them for something else, so it was well past time to actually finish that.

As usual, I tried to make sure I didn't break anything, but do let me know if you notice anything off. While doing this I did notice a couple of things that were broken and now no longer are, and I made some general tweaks - most prominently, some screenshots in the spriting guide are now just shown on the page rather than being linked.

A couple of things then went beyond tweaks: I got carried away making rewrites to the ancient Proving Sprite Theft page and the Reviewing Guide. The former was distinctly outdated and just written in a very teen-me sort of way (it's not really a page I'd make today, especially since spriting is not nearly as popular as it was, but rather than remove it altogether I tried to just keep all the advice that was there while updating it a bit), and the latter was something I'd been wanting to rewrite for a while for many reasons, most prominently that I'd grown to find some of its takes and presentation downright weird. Hopefully now they both make a bit more sense for a modern audience, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

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I've just done a long-overdue Python upgrade for the site, which also came with upgrading various libraries and so on. I believe I tested most everything reasonably thoroughly and everything ought to be working like it did before, but it's entirely possible I missed some edge case somewhere, so let me know if anything seems off or if you get any strange errors anywhere.

I also fixed a couple of typos and such. Can't believe how often I managed to read over the Jolteon article apparently without noticing a missing 'the'.

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I've made some smaller updates, some already pushed to the site at some point since the anniversary update:

• The Pokémon Hangman, a game of great sentimental value to me ever since my dad helped me make it as my first introduction to JavaScript back in 2002, was always kind of randomly a standalone static page, which meant it arbitrarily stuck out, did not adapt to your chosen style, and also really didn't work great on phones, where you had to zoom in awkwardly to even read the instructions and the letters you had to press to play were way too small. I was reminded of this in the process of putting together the anniversary update, and now I've finally just brought it into the site layout properly as well as updating it a bit so that the clickable areas for each letter are much bigger, making it play better on a touch screen. I kept the old charging-Pikachu images, and because those were designed for a white background and I no longer have the original files, I ended up putting the game itself into a little white rounded box. Unfortunately this means it doesn't quite adapt to your style in the ideal sort of way, but I hope you'll agree it's a definite improvement.
• Meanwhile, the Number Game has also been updated, this time with some user suggestions: in addition to being a bit more permissive with Pokémon whose names contain special characters, it now shows the number of the Pokémon you guessed if you get it wrong (assuming what you typed is a real Pokémon) – and there is now an additional game mode where it will show you a random Pokémon from the range and you guess its number. Alongside this, I made some tweaks to the look and functionality of the game that streamline it a bit and make it easier to use – the guess input and the buttons you click to proceed are now on the 'card' directly and shown contextually, rather than having two different buttons you need to alternate between, and the settings are placed below and you don't need to click anything to start with the default settings.
• I added a bit more information, in particular on Pokémon Legends: Arceus and on where you can find Espeon and Umbreon in the wild, to the Espeon and Umbreon page.
• I updated the Fake Cheats section with a bit more of a preamble, since it's now being a bit more prominently linked and all, and today not everyone will have the context to understand what's being referenced anymore.

There'll probably be more little updates of a similar scale upcoming soon before I get to the next more major additions, since as I mentioned, the anniversary update did a lot of making me want to tweak things. As usual, let me know if you bump into any issues.

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