Time for feasting and glee
now that you're twenty-three.
Happy birthday, dear website!
You're so important to me.

The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty-three years old today! It's been a very eventful year for me (I have a non-website kid now), but I still managed to make time to get the Mew trick essay out the door, which is one of my favorite things I've ever made for this site, so I'll count that as a big win.

For this anniversary, in the continuing spirit of doing something oriented towards meta features on the site, I've done something I've been musing on for a little while. After all these years, there is a lot of content on this website – and both because of how much there is and simply because of a shift in how people tend to use the internet, I suspect it's not very realistic at this point to expect a lot of visitors to be going through the menu to find out what else is on it, once they're here. Once a given bit of content is off the front page (as the Mew trick essay would be with this update, if I hadn't linked to it in this update too), it may become hard for new visitors to actually learn it even exists. Meanwhile, while a lot of trends in modern web design just irritate me, I've noticed that having links at the bottom of a page that offer other related pages to check out are often something that legitimately piques my curiosity and hooks me in to read more, when I would probably not have bothered to browse through the menu or archives looking for more. Often, on the modern ad-encrusted web, what those links lead to is actually just some clickbait or uninformative slop, mind, but the principle of offering the reader other stuff they might be interested in after they're done reading one thing is perfectly sound and useful.

Obviously, these sorts of links are generally generated by algorithms based on keywords and trending statistics. But on a hand-made site like this, I started to imagine: what if I just genuinely hand-picked some other pages to link to from each page, making it more likely that someone reading something like the Mew trick essay will find their way to the glitched Jolteon essay or the in-depth article about how R/B/Y's random number generator affects capturing? I'd like people reading one thing I've made to get to hear about what other similar stuff I've made, if they might enjoy it, even if there isn't any obvious natural reason for the main body of the page to link to it.

What I ended up doing reuses the scaffolding of the Featured Section feature, which was already subtly featuring a single random page as the top link under Site on the menu, and thus reuses the same descriptions for the related pages – though I ended up rewriting a lot of those descriptions, because I originally made the featured section feature nearly two decades ago. (That's 2006 – and if you can believe it, every page of content I've added since 2006 has had a description written specifically for the purposes of this feature from 2006 that most people probably barely notice.) Each page of content on the menu defines a set of four related pages to link to, chosen by hand based on whatever I felt might be most likely to appeal to someone reading this – though pages that for one reason or another don't have their own defined related pages will display a selection of four pages picked at random out of the 'featurable' pages. I had some fun picking out what pages to feature where – there are some amusing picks here and there, like the Mew trick article linking the fake cheats, some of the site's oldest content – and it was also a bit of a nostalgia trip just going through a lot of pages I hadn't actually looked at in many, many years. It has also given me a great urge to fix and rewrite various things that I wrote very badly sometime in 2004, mind – but I stuck mostly to just adding the related links for now.

While doing this I also got sidetracked with redoing how the menu works, as well as doing some database updates that should have fixed some incorrect names in the Gen IV Locations among other things but could possibly have broken something; please let me know if you notice anything off anywhere. I also fixed some minor things here and there that I happened to notice, added notices to my Pokémon Go pages to note they are out of date (which pains me a bit, but I don't actually play or keep up with what's going on with it very closely anymore, and realistically I just cannot commit to trying to keep them updated again when the game might completely redo major mechanics at any time), and added Legends: Z-A information to the Espeon and Umbreon page.

All in all, not the most exciting update if you're a devoted fan of the site with an encyclopedic knowledge of what pages exist on it already, but hopefully a good one for new and occasional visitors. I was vaguely hoping to do a few more things that I didn't have time to here; I might get on that in the coming days.

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