Update

12/09/25: URLs and Guide Rewrites

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 The former was distinctly outdated and just written in a very teen-me sort of way (it's not really a page I'd make today, especially since spriting is not nearly as popular as it was, but rather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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Page last modified November 20 2025 at 17:02 UTC