Revamping my site!

To say that it's been quiet around here would be an understatement.

Why it's been quiet

The primary reason is, of course, laziness. Interest seemed to be very little to nonexistant, which makes perfect sense considering the little following I have. Barely anyone even reads blog posts in general these days, so it's quite a stretch to expect mine to attract any sort of interest without some post going viral.

Also I found it to be quite the challenge to consistently find topics and ideas worth talking about! I set myself a clearly scheduled goal, but ideas quickly stopped flowing. Especially since I just went through a year of school again, but luckily that is now over!

But what might've been the biggest reason...

The site sucked.

I finally made it suck slightly less! Perhaps now it might just be about bearable reading on here.

In particular, reading on mobile devices -- which is by far the primary means of browsing the web nowadays -- was a pain. Without using reader modes of web browsers, text would be way too small and elements out of scale.

The posts themselves were unengaging, featuring very little outside of plain text and some hyperlinks. No images to support what's being written.

I was now stuck: either I find some pre-made solution that's way too overengineered for what I'm aiming for, or I remake the site from scratch myself. Both these options require lots of effort for no real gain. You can probably guess which route I took!

The solution: Build it myself!

This blog was previously, and in most parts still is, based on pure hand-written HTML files.

I started by developing server-side software that would take Markdown files as inputs to stop me spamming paragraphs, headers and links as raw HTML elements. That went about okay with Ktor and the Commonmark library to parse Markdown.

The input Markdown files looked like this:

                ---
title: Hello World
date: 2024-06-01
tags: [intro, kotlin]
---

# Welcome

This is my first post.

However, I quickly abandoned that project as it was turning out to be way over-engineered again and eating a ton of time. The fun I had quickly fell down a cliff and as usual for my software projects, it now sits entirely forgotten in one of the dozen source directories.

I then turned to a more reasonable idea: Simply improve what's already there! Instead of religiously avoiding JavaScript like the plague for some badly needed dynamic features, let's use it to automate some boring parts like generating the new index page and adding some other cool features, like these!

Brand new features!

Here's an non-exhaustive list of new features, some badly needed, others nice to have:

• Proper support for mobile form-factors using the @media CSS query
• Tagging system allowing you to filter posts by topic
• Search bar, making it possible to search all posts by query
• Dynamically generated index/home page, significantly speeding up the process of making a new post
• Dynamically generated table of contents inside all posts that almost works fine
• Expandable images by clicking/tapping
• Nicer looking code blocks as seen all around this page!

What's coming next

More stuff, hopefully! I have three ideas in my head right now, but a lot of things have happened in the past year I've been absent - some are more awesome, some are less...

There's also a brand new Telegram channel where I post almost daily! More regularly than on the Fediverse, where I'm still more or less active.