Blogly - Progress update

Greetings! I'm happy to announce that I'm not dead! I apologize for not updating this for ages, but I've been dealing with a lot of personal problems over the past year, and I needed to take a break from dealing with this project.

Where I've been

For the past 9 something months I know that I've been completely silent on this, but things are coming along nicely. I've been extremely busy working on various other side projects to experiment on backend development and better ways to make this service work the first time. I believe I'm finally ready to pick this up again.

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a fresh start

good {{TIME}}, some pretty huge changes are about to happen! up until now this blog has basically been a sloppy prototype, it was terribly put together, the parser sucked, it looked awful, its database structure sucked. that's going to change soon. right now, i'm working on rewriting this from scratch with better code and better features, one of the biggest being that other people will be able to post too. this is a massive change so it will probably take a while, but it's absolutely going to be worth it.

cool incremental games

good get_time_of_day(std::chrono::system_clock::now())! i'm sorry i haven't been posting much, i've been playing a lot of silly incremental games recently, real good time wasters.

monies^2

monies^2 is a simple incremental game, it has funny mspaint graphics and about 4 stages from what i can tell. i'm currently working on sacrificing more and more money to summon dreams hoping i can get something nice, you should try it, its not very hands on.

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comments

good ${timeOfDay}! its been over a week since i last posted, but that's because i've been working on the biggest change to this website yet: comments!

adding comments turned out to be one of the difficult things to do yet and i had to change most of the website and rewrite a lot of internal logic to get it to work, i had to allow people to make accounts so that they could make comments, but there was no concept of permissions, and anyone with an account could create posts. to solve that i had to add in a rights system and change creating posts to do that, but then i had to find a assign some rights to users without having to manually go in and give them said rights, so i had to add groups and set it up to add everyone to a certain group. once i did that i realized that it would be a huge pain to add rights to the database manually so i set up a tool to let me regenerate the database whenever i needed to (doing that every time rights are requested would get bad fast). after i had a decent rights system set up, i needed to add comments, so i made more web component things to do that (sorry about the flash of unstyled stuff while the component js is loading, i'm trying to figure out how to make that faster)

i suppose since i'm letting people add comments i should add a reference on the site's markup language (well, mediawiki's markup language)

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better than twitter

good $TIME_OF_DAY! been a couple days since i've last posted. i've been hard at work adding formatting and an edit button (we now have a bigger feature set than twitter oh sorry... "X"...)

formatting

so i added a formatting system (well... duh), thats pretty cool. i decided to base it off wikitext because it had all the formatting characters in one place (unlike markdown where youre reaching all over your keyboard), so 2 's would italicize something and 3 would make something bold, = would make headings. i also fixed newlines because they used to not actually show the newline part (every post should render as intended now). eventually i want to add escape characters, images and links so i can show more than just a big wall of text on here.

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fun with perl and an rss feed

good <INSERT TIME OF DAY HERE>! today's been a busy day. </INSERT TIME OF DAY HERE>

i've been working on minifying my code, the javascript and css seemed pretty easy so i set them aside for later, the real challenge was dealing with the html. html has all sorts of special cases (newlines may or may not be meaningful, whitespace may be rendered) so it was a challenge to figure out what i could and couldnt get rid of, and there werent any tools available that didnt add a runtime performance penalty for php. eventually i was able to cook up some awful perl monstrosity that seemed to work well *enough* (it completely destroyed the 404 page for some reason so i had to go in and fix that). im glad thats over with and i shouldnt have to worry about it anymore.

i've also added an rss feed at https://xutils.org/blog/rss for anyone who still uses an rss reader (if you arent you totally should its so nice having all your news in one place). i dont really have that much to say about it so i guess thats going to be the end of todays entry!

finally up and running

hello internet! big day today, this is the first persistent post on here. over the last few days i programmed this silly blog software to put give my deranged thoughts somewhere to live and to hopefully be able to hold myself accountable so i dont randomly abandon projects im working on (its a bit harder to get rid of something when other people know about it :P). im hoping to eventually add more stuff to it like better formatting or images or comments or an rss feed (definitely an rss feed, those are always great).
while i was working on it i learned a lot about web dev beyond static pages and some simple js, im excited to see how this goes, if all of this was made in just 5 days i cant imagine how itll end up looking in a year.

note to self: make it so creating a post doesnt discard the draft because the database code messed up and i had to rewrite this whole thing from scratch
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