Greetings, fu(jo|dan|jin) and friends, It's almost that time of the year again, when BobaBoard retrospectives get written and April 1st jokes are planned and (one way or the other) delivered. Before we go heads down again on our Recurring Spring Obligations™ and FujoGuide Issue 2, our current priority, here's the roundup of what we've been up to since you last saw read us.
🌸✨ A FRIENDLY NOTE ✨🌸This edition was written by Ms Boba herself, without much chance for others to stop her help review and revise. Please enjoy her typos, writing quirks, excessive parentheticals (and occasional digressions (and nested asides)).
FujoCoded General News [Omakase]
Note: This is a "omakase" selection of our company's updates. Enjoy the full menu on our website.
Get-ProjectManager’d: Thanks to last newsletter's plea, we have an official Project Manager! While not exactly a fujin (yet?), James is a wise, older, non-binary eldritch horror of knowledge who has been helping fan communities since 1995...and now helps us. Other than guiding the transition from Ms Boba's planet-sized charts to actual GitHub issues, and wrangling our raccoons collaborators in her stead, James has introduced us to Posh-chan, Microsoft's official PowerShell gijinka and absolute BombShell of a... shell. Now that is culture fit!
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Recent
Coding in Space(s): There's a new article at the event horizon! Sel and Grubdog joined forces to (space)ship learn@ readers straight into a full development environment by teaching them about GitHub Codespaces. Want to Halo jump into coding your site or contributing to one of our projects without first installing a bunch of stuff? Steal compute from Leverage Microsoft's generous (free) offerings and get a full computer in your browser—Catboys, alas, not included.
One (S)hell of a Breakup: Last you heard from us, we were splitting up NPMarticles to (allegedly) improve their readability. Having acquired a taste for dramatic breakups—in, you know, true fujo spirit—we've proceeded to tear more articles apart: "What is a Terminal?" and "Choosing your Terminal" have, alas(?), separated, and we've also thrown the absolutely-not-quick Terminal series out of "quickstarts"."HTML & CSS: Editing Basics", now alone, claims it's nice to have the section all for themselves, but we know denial and mutual pining when we see it.
Spec-tacularly Written: Speaking of moving out on your own, our community is stepping up to help us create the learn@ we all wish to see on the web. But this very appreciated collaboration, while "just as planned hoped", adds the extra challenge of *deep breath* creating a cohesive creative vision across a variety of creatives. To (style) guide us, Rie has updated—and even PR'd!—our community@'s learn@ writing specs. Incidentally, we've also discovered the Diataxis framework, which has helped us all get on the same (web)page not just about the how but the what we're writing. Wish us luck sweat, but eventual success!
License to Learn: Nothing like having to make legal decisions reminds you the ol' 9 to 5 still has its perks. Thankfully, rather than giving into despair and dusting off our resumes, we put on our bravest attitude, faced our fears, and worked out a dual-licensing model for learn@ articles. In a few words: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial for the public (so everyone can copy and remix our articles—but not sell them), and a more permissive license for FujoCoded (so we can write our paid Zines and coding offerings without legal anxieties). You'll hear more about this in future newsletters: the legal ducks are, after all, ever waddling 🦆🦆🦆
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Future
Nearly Viable Manuscript: Now that we're in the future (section), you may wonder where our article on installing NVM is at. TL;DR(eview): Submerged in an avalanche of "//TODO"s, we left the most complete article for last...then found it needed just a bit more style-guide polish to fit with its peers. While we didn't have time to give it, there's no need to despair: we're currently pushing and pulling pronouns, tenses, bulletpoints, and assorted Starlight components, and will publish this excellent article as soon as we've bestowed it the appropriate ~learn@ vibe~.
Taken for (April) Fools: We have so many great things cooking, and they all deserve their time and space to simmer! Between polishing articles, our ongoing FujoGuide rewrite, and FujoCoded's LLC #1 Company Holiday slash Prime Immovable Deadline™—that is, our April 1st fun(d)raiser—we'll keep Learn@ work going in the background so it can properly absorb all those creative juices.
Intermission — A Word to our $ponsors
This update (and ongoing work) is brought to you by our lovely Patrons: our raccoon-employees demand the fanciest of trash, and those legal ducks will only waddle on premium grain—we couldn't feed them without you all!
If you've not boarded our ship yet, jump on our Patreon now! Tiers start at $3/month, and give you access to coupons and discounted or limited-edition merchandise. We're working on a $upporters area so you can (among others) showcase your blorbo on a big wall!
Did you know? Studies show our Patrons are 47% more likely to have their OTP become canon...or have them explode in a juicy cloud of drama—whatever their preference.
Around the FujoVerse
In the Git(hub)
Welcome to the GitHub: A warm shoutout to the newest first-time contributors to our GitHub—and for some GitHub itself: Ev, Hyena(✨first ever!✨), deepspaceaxolotl (✨first ever!✨), and Rie(✨first ever!✨)! Whether with a PR, a review, or a README, their generous contribution keeps us going and (not going to lie) makes us shed little tears of gratitude. Thank you for making the FujoVerse a little bit shinier ✨
Astro-nomical Fanfic Data: Scraping AO3 data is fun, but you know what's even more fun (and simple)? Using AO3 data in your Astro webiste with our Astro AO3 loader plugin! This plugin's first official release now works with Astro 5, and supports series in addition to works. Plus, Ev (our valiant hero) gave it a proper README! So go forth now, load fics on your Astro site, and call it "learning webdev"...cause it totally is!
AO3.js goes Adult: Our AO3 scraping library/Official "Fan Bait" Project™ got a bunch of upgrades: we've added support for adult works (we see you 😎) and listing tag synonyms (for internal purposes Certified Shady® 🥷), exported Zod schemas for ease of integration (e.g. our Astro loader plugin 👀👆), and overhauled error handling. Check out the release notes for the full changelog.
FujoStore Highlights: Restocks, Sales, and Limited-Time Offers
You've (hopefully) already seen our RobinBoob relaunch and associated "limited-time offer", which officially expired...almost a week ago.
That said, and stop me if you've heard this...what is time, to real love?
To celebrate finally making it past the writing a lot of copy (an avoid setting up another promo) we're extending RobinBoob's Valentine's Day 15% off (with code LOVE_IS_TIMELESS) until March 14th!
Want to help us help the fandom web? Are you a social campaign expert wishing for some monetary return (💰), or a GitHub connoisseur willing to donate your time to The Cause™? Read on!
[🙏]One Peer to Herd Them All: We're not quite ready yet (the draft needs a few more weeks), but we'll soon be looking for a volunteer beta readers coordinator to help wrangle FujoGuide Issue 2 Beta 2. The gig: sit in a Discord group DM with 6-7 fannish beginners as they brave our GitHub zine, and help them surface unscathed. You don't need deep GitHub expertise —just enough familiarity to get beginners unstuck. If this sounds like your thing, reach out NOW so we can hit the ground running when it's time. DM us or write us at [email protected]!
[💰]Social Media Campaign Lead & Copywriter: Are you a fandom person (or adjacent) with a penchant for capturing the hearts (and eyes) of your fellow netizens?We're looking for a paid contractor to plan/write social media launch campaigns for our projects and products—think Bluesky threads, cross-platform posts, and short newsletter blurbs. You'll own the campaign timelines, wrangle the content delivery, and work directly with our founder to help us sound like ourselves...just uncharacteristically on schedule. This is a per-campaign role ($150–250/campaign), and we welcome experience from non-traditional avenues: fandom, zine promo, indie launches, crowdfunding, or anywhere you've had to get people excited and rallying. Apply here!
That’s All, Folks!
And with this, it's all for these months! It took us a long while, but we've made it on the other side...somehow.
FujoGuide updates aside (follow them on our socials), we'll see you on the other side of March 31st 👀 until then, "good night, ship tight, don't let the discourse bite!"
This Sunday, March 1st 2026, we’ll be (once again) haunting the virtual halls of CitrusCon—not with a talk, but with a “Q&Ad-lib”, an innovative panel format where Ms Boba attempts to prepare in advance, runs out of time, and is then forced to improvise live. Luckily, she’s good at that! …or is she?
If you want to help her—or, you know, the opposite—send in your questions here. We’ll be focusing on the future of the fandom web and how we can build it together.
Valentine's Day Promo: Time-Crossed Lovers Edition
Rejoice, Shippers! Come hither and feast your eyes on the new, improved RobinBoob, featuring a week-long, 15%-off-all-ships Valentine's Day bonanza.
Now, some naysayers might cry: "but how can you have a Valentine's promo, when February 14th was more than a week ago?" Irrelevant! What is time to real love? And what are other powerful, terrifying forces like, you know, launch deadlines?
In Top Shipshape: What better way to spend New Year holidays than to revisit one of our most beloved moneymakers April 1st jokes? RobinBoob came out the other side of 2025 with a serious "new year, new me": we added PayPal (our longest-standing request), braved database optimization so searches aren't painfully slow, and snuck in a handful of quality-of-life improvements ready for you to discover on your own. The short version: everything's faster, smoother, more featureful—and, of course, ready to take your hard-earned money in exchange for meaningless JPEGs (...or are they?).
Certified Gift-Giver: In true Valentine's spirit, you can now officially gift ship certificates to other people. No more putting in your bestie's email at checkout and hoping Stripe won't forward your credit card details (it wouldn't): we've built a proper gifting flow, complete with a notification email and personal note, so your giftees will always know you're thinking of them thinking of fictional characters smashing. If you haven't sent a proper Valentine's yet, this makes the perfect gift for your partner, your best friend, or even just yourself. Already sent one? Well, you know what we think: time means nothing when you're sharing some love.
Return of the Ship-Watchers: Remember when the RobinBoob Twitter account used to post every ship purchase, uniting us in celebration of each other's excellent taste, or (for some), in the pleasure of inflicting our questionable palate upon others? Unfortunately, having fallen to "imperscrutable business acumen", that tradition was lost...until now: starting today, Ship-watching is back on all our store socials (tumblr,mastodon, and bluesky)except Twitter. Subscribe, spectate, and judge celebrate accordingly—and obviously, buy some ships to add to the feed.
P.S. to honor this relaunch, we'll be reposting one ship from our archive every 6 hours (in chronological order) until we're all caught up. If you see yours, make sure to boost it with your very own certificate!
Greetings, fu(jo|dan|jin) and friends, End of year celebrations are upon us, and what better way to usher them in than the unique—and belated 🙇—gift of a signature FujoCoded update?
Venture down this edition for the steadfast progress on taking the production of learn@ content off Ms Boba's tired shoulders, our early 2026 hiring push—Project Managers and Volunteers coordinatorsheed our call!—and the many things happening in the ever-expanding FujoVerse™!
FujoCoded General Company News [Omakase]
Note: This is a "omakase" selection of our company's updates. Enjoy the full menu on our website.
Cookies Complete: The Fandom Cookies digital pack is out at last: head to our store right nowto learn to build your own fortune generator website! This pack includes a ton of content, featuring a full set of wallpapers and digital goodies from fannish artists, alongside our HTML/CSS/JavaScript learn-along “with heavily commented code for beginners stepping up”. And if you buy it now,you’ll also get a discount for the ✨fancy edition✨ (for future release), which builds upon the regular pack to help you master ~even fancier~, more advanced CSS, JS, and HTML techniques.
Cleaning Up Our Mart: With the digital pack buyers at our doors, we carved up the time—and adrenaline—to tidy up the FujoCoded store. In record time, we’ve added a ton of missing stuff like card backgrounds that help stickers pop, on-click image magnification (so you can see what you’re buying), and even made it much, much faster to load! While these changes improve our store for everyday visitors, they've long been in our to-do list for the launch of FujoGuide Issue 1—that table of contents would be hard to read otherwise👇👀
FujoCoded Backerkit Update
Editor's Note: BackerKit funds helped launch learn@ by funding our Terminal and NPM series, so we'll be officially including all progress here from here on out!
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Recent
Workshopping Writers: Our friend and article writer Rie took our existing learn@ style guide into their own hands (and wisdom). After giving our existing guidelines a very-needed coat of polish and clarity, they used their experience to concoct a better article writing AND review process—all this so we can spread our (free) knowledge faster and more sustainably! If that was not enough, they’re now test-driving this same process, guiding a kind volunteer in reviewing the Terminal series you funded (🙏) and upgrading it to fit our latest guidelines.
Amicable Divorce: Ms Boba’s been breaking up marriages again, this time splitting up our NPM articles into more focused and approachable (not to mention less scary) chunks. Hand-on exercises—like Running NodeJS programs and Learn and Practice NPM—are now cozily settled in their single-occupancy home(page)s, so you can head directly to your preferred learning avenue, or more easily link your friends to the exact skills they seek.
Shoot for the Stars: Behold the outline of our Astro learning path! As the last newsletter foretold, the collective hive-mind gathered forth in our Astro stream to ponder the missing pieces in the existing Astro docs. The verdict? While they’re excellent for people starting a website from scratch, Astro's docs lack guidance for those wishing to upgrade their handcrafted sites—a significant portion of our own target audience! We have, alas, not yet placed this “jump on the Astro rocket without leaving your site behind” series in our schedule, but we’re eager to start as our current articles (and other assorted obligations) wind down.
FujoCoded BackerKit Fulfillment Progress: Future
NVM Extras: We’ve had your first batch of NPM articles, yes, but what about a second batch? In the very first partnership of its kind, the BobaBoard Docs Bubble—aka, sociocratic circle—collectively drafted an installation guide for NVM—aka, Node Version Manager—which is our recommended avenue of getting access to NodeJS—aka, JavaScript but outside the Browser. Next up, we’ll add this guide to learn@ to help people install NodeJS the proper way by not installing it. A huge thank you to “The Docs”, our doc-torly bunch who all prefer the cover of anonymity, for their much better write-up on this complicated relationship!
Governance and You: With community@ up and ready, we can start filling it up with some currently-internal guides on Sociocracy, the collective governance system FujoVerse™ projects are working to adopt and evangelize. This “working in communities” learning area is also where the “Dealing with Interpersonal Conflict” article this campaign funded will live… as soon as we’ve set up our existing writing commitments up for success, and we’re ready to tackle more writing—in both quantity and ambition.
Intermission — A Word to our $ponsors
This update (and our ongoing work) is brought to you by our lovely Patrons! Couldn’t keep this running without y’all—raccoons need so much food, and don’t even get us started on their unquenchable thirst for doujinshi.
If you’ve not already boarded our ship, jump on our Patreon now! Tiers start at $3/month, and give you access to coupons and—see our FujoStore highlights below 👀—priority access to discounted or limited-edition merchandise. You’ll soon even be able to showcase your blorbo on a big wall!
Did you know? Studies show our Patrons are 30% more likely to receive long in-depth fanfiction of their rarepairs (it’s true, we swear)!
Around the FujoVerse [Omakase]
In the Git(hub)
Autorelease of Our Own: As the FujoVerse™ grows, so must our ability to keep up with its pace—which means we’ve started adding autorelease to our libraries! This process automatically keeps track of code changes, builds a list of new features, and lets us quickly release new versions into the wild. You can witness our first such release on @fujocoded/ao3.js (formerly @bobaboard/ao3.js). Among the latest features: tag search, fetching work content, non-AO3 archives support, and download URLs!
Astrolabe’s Blasting Off (Again): Long-time friends may remember Astrolabe, the “universal rich text editor for multi-platform content” we’ve been chipping away at since, well…almost our origins! Now, with our ATproto connections bemoaning the need for something Astrolabe-shaped, we’re once again set on making “fetch” happen: Ms Boba has been slowly publishing her private plugins while polishing the Astrolabe repo (check out the new README and latest Storybook), upgrading libraries to the latest version, and experimenting with loading posts from other socials (like Leaflet) or decentralized ATproto emoji. Alongside her, fellow BobaBoard Builders Bubble member Sel has been working on making Spoilers accessible to screen readers as he familiarizes himself with the codebase. Want to join ‘em? Read on 👀👇
Join the Cult: What’s better than us adding new functionality to our open source projects? Helping you—yes you!—do the same! The BobaBoard Builders Bubble recently banded together to open contributor-friendly issues for both AO3.js and Astrolabe, so people like you—yes you!—can come show (or learn) how it’s done! So look around, swing by, throw some code at the wall, and come ask for help if lost! These’ll look great on your resume, portfolio, and Hinge profile, we swear.
A Plethora of Plugins: While the aforementioned autorelease will (eventually) help communicate our changes in an efficient and orderly manner, we unfortunately aren’t quite there yet, so…here’s a quick roundup of updates *deep breath*: haetae has been working doubletime to add README and examples to authproto, we’ve been prototyping friends-only Astro page functionality,cross-posting to Bluesky from your very own blog, and fetching your latest social contacts from your own PDS; we’ve also been pumping our Guestbook full of moderation goodness, like blocking users, hiding submissions, and deleting guestbooks! At this stage, it is almost ready for launch, awaiting a final deliberation on text formatting while our sysadmin Kat sets it up to run on our server); and we’d be remiss not to mention tools built for our own use, like syncing our collaborators repository with our website’s “contributors” folder (making it much easier to credit appropriately), or centralizing and standardizing our deploy scripts.
FujoStore Highlights: Restocks, Sales, and Limited-Time Offers
Are you up smut’s creek without a paddle? If you’re on our Patreon, we can fix that! Whilst scavenging for snacks, loose change, and good ol’ Christmas ornaments, Ms Boba found a bunch of the Fujoboard seconds, which means…
…all our Patreon $upporters are cordially invited to FujoCoded’s First Garage Sale! These back-of-the-closet paddles may have small flaws (such as scratches, nicks, and prominent wood patterns), but are still a classy and refined choice for your kitchen and bedroom needs! They’re up to $20 (+ 20% $upporters discount) off, so get them whilst they’re hot!
Our stock includes:
Hime boards stamped with the vintage BobaBoard logo—$10 off!
Utterly unique Hime, only slightly scuffed, with minor marks, colour difference, or wood grain—$20 off!
Chibi boards, for those of you who aren’t size queens (hey, we don’t judge)—$15 off!
For a mere $5 more, you can even get some engraved with any of our available wordings—including the sold out ones! See our store for the full list, and become a Patreon subscriber today to access both the Garage Sale AND the traditional store-wide discount. Not to mention, help us pay people to...
Collaborate with Us!
Welcome to the special opportunities we’re recruiting or hiring for at this time 👇 As the new year dawns, we’ll be looking to start it on the right foot with a recurring theme: coordination (of volunteers), coordination (of beta readers), and coordination (of tasks)! Without further ado, check out our volunteer positions (🙏) or head straight to our paid one (💰).
[🙏] Who’ll Wrangle the Wranglers?: Our origin project, BobaBoard, is looking for a “Volunteer Wranglers” coordinator! Do you have experience recruiting, organizing, and directing volunteers? Are you excited by the meta-challenge of recruiting, organizing, and directing the volunteers who’ll do this alongside you? And most importantly—are you willing to do what’s needed to get fandom people working together in pursuit of a better fandom web? Let us know by filling BobaBoard's Volunteers Coordinator application form.
[🙏] Betas seek Alpha: FujoGuide is looking for a beta readers coordinator! The task, for those who choose to accept it, is to sit patiently in a Discord group DMs with other 6-7 fannish beginners as they brave our GitHub issue of FujoGuide and (with your guidance) surface unscathed! You don’t need deep expertise of GitHub to take on this challenge, just be familiar enough with branching, merging, and the pull request process to help people get unstuck. Ideally, we’d like to keep this a volunteer position as it’s traditionally been, but we’d be happy to barter zines, knowledge, or other merch for payment in kind! DM us or write us at [email protected] to apply.
[💰] Technical Procyon Manager: Sun Tzu said, “if you know not yourself, [...] you will lose half your battles”. Luckily, we don’t just know our weaknesses, we know how to fix them. So we’ll be starting 2026 getting Ms Boba some Project Management support: have experience wrangling milestones in legible dashboards? love pestering (and guiding!) people who owe deliverables? Apply here and come help FujoCoded move away from project charts only Ms Boba can read, while freeing her brain from the woes of keeping folks on track! This is a temporary, part-time position to help us regroup and set up a working system.
That’s All, Fujin!
Phew, what a journey! Thank you for reading (or skimming) all the way down.
We can't wait to see you in the next year (and newsletter), with a moderate quantity of new updates. Since not quite as much time will pass—we pinkie swear!—we hope the update will look thinner, but not for that less meaty.
As always, quality over quantity, mind over matter, seme over uke.
Imminent Release: a lucky digital treat for Black Friday ✨🥠
Greetings, fujin and friends, This is not the newsletter you've been waiting for… yet.
Our next edition is currently being edited and re-edited, and will land in full in your inboxes in the next couple of weeks, pinkie promise! 🤞
In the meantime, we're writing because we didn't want you to miss the soft launch price on one of the items you've heard so much about: our Fandom Cookies Digital Pack. Right now, this pack is only $9.99 until its official launch on Friday, November 28th!
Inside you'll find website goodies, wallpapers, a store discount, and—above all—an HTML/CSS/JavaScript learn-along built with the knowledge, experience, and fortunes we collected as part of our work. Once again, this is an extension of all you've helped fund with your support during our campaign, and we're excited to put one more learning tool in one more format in your hands and WAY beyond.
Our learn-along is a fully functional interactive web project inspired by the April 1st event you all loved and (hopefully) tasted: Fandom Cookies.
This project features a single page with a responsive single-column layout, a "flavor selector," and a button to randomly select a fandom fortune with that flavor—exactly like the ones in our cookies!
But here’s the twist: unlike our physical cookies, the code that makes this page is heavily commented and thoughtfully put together so you can learn modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript just by reading and playing along.
Most importantly, this learn-along features clear explanations to the struggles we've seen code adventurers face over and over:
How to create responsive layouts
How to control the flow, position, and spacing of page elements
Effective styling with advanced CSS selectors
Getting started with interactivity in JavaScript
And, above all, this learn-along features modern code you can trust—unlike those potentially outdated Stack Overflow answers.
If you're curious, you can find a full table of contents in our social posts:
You may remember from our previous newsletters that this digital pack was meant to have a "simple" and "fancy" version.
While finalizing it for this launch, however, we looked at the sheer amount of content we had, and a realization hit us just like it had hit many uke before: it's just too big.
With enough material for two in-depth HTML/CSS/JavaScript courses, we were then posed with a dilemma:
Price it fairly based on the content, which would make it too expensive and less accessible to our public
Price it low, which wouldn't do justice to the months of labor we put into these materials
So, we instead decided to split the project in two:
The Standard Version, the one you can buy today and that officially launches this Black Friday
The Fancy Version, which will follow later in 2026, containing more advanced, deep-dive content—that is, a full second version of this site with even more lessons—that just needs to be reviewed and polished!
Still, here's a itty bitty tiny secret preview for you: Black Friday (and current) buyers don't know it yet, but we'll be offering a heavy discount on the future upgrade as part of the launch sale. If you buy it now (during Soft Launch), you will:
Get the Standard Version for just $9.99…
...and an even bigger discount for the "Fancy" version—early preview access too!
This is our way of saying thank you for sticking with us, even when our newsletter is late 🙏😘 so once again…
tl;dr (for non-backers): we've updated our rewards for this campaign with the new Gitea and Forgejo character sheets! The exclusive content is right below 👇
If you don't have access to the campaign rewards but want to know all about them, may we suggest our Patreon 👀❗? Coming there soon!
