Dev Diary 0012: January 1st - 16th 2024

I’ve spent the last few weeks of the New Year, like a lot of others, reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go. So this update is a little more rambling than most.

Work

I want to never use Azure Dev Ops again. It is giving me such a headache. I still can’t get our release pipeline working after upgrading our solution to .NET 8. Entity framework is complaining and its convoluted and not my strong suit.

One of the pitfalls of being a solo developer. No one to ask questions or to brainstorm off of. ::sigh::

Personal Projects

My blog

Not too much happening here other than adding in the search-space plugin by @sod on my search page and rearranging how posts appear on the index page as I shared in this update: Some minor blog updates.

The basic Hugo code I used can be found on my paste bin

In general the idea is to group the posts by date with a .GroupByDate That gives you access to the {{ .Key }} which is the date and then {{ .Pages }} which is a collection that corresponds to that date. Then you need to sort the {{ .Pages }} in reverse. That’s accomplished by {{ range .Pages.Reverse }}

I do have some other updates I want to get around to like adding a blogroll, which I might use the bookmarks feature of micro.blog for and creating a digital garden/wiki.

A CYOA/Gamebook website

This is a very very rough concept right now. But I’d love to code a generic fantasy RPG as a gamebook or a “choose your own adventure” type game. I have the concept and flow chart written out. I also want to do it sans game engine and either code one up myself or craft standalone HTML pages. I also want to make my own artwork for it. I picked up a couple of illustration books to start practicing.

Lillihub

Earlier this week I shared this video showcasing my favorite part about Lillihub, that it works 100% without JavaScript:

I can’t think of any other social media site that can do that. Please let me know if another one out there exists.

Back in 2023 I decided I wanted to flex my front-end coding muscles a bit. I was having lots of fun playing around with my blog design and exploring neocities sites. I went off on a tangent exploring iframes as a bit of a retro website frame system. I still think there is something to that, both as a way to manage a static website and to build very basic local apps. It was fun throwing together a calendar and a little budgeting app with it. That’s actually what Lillihub started as, until I ran into CORS issues. Then when I tossed in a backend with Deno, using my iframe trick didn’t seem useful. So I decided to challenge myself with writing all my own css and doing it all without JavaScript. Version 1 of the app had no JavaScript at all and I learned a ton doing it.

• Did you know you can stream HTML to the browser like a video? I didn’t.
• Did you know that you can target the action of an iframe to a different element? I didn’t.

It’s been a very fun project to build. Probably my favorite personal project ever. It even beat that time I folded 1000 origami cranes.

Updates

Not too many updates were user facing. The biggest one was probably the editor previewing images as you write markdown. There were also a handful of bug fixes and I’m ordering the posts by date_timestamp, but I’m not sure that fixed the timeline marker issue. I’ll need to investigate further.

Future Roadmap?

I’ve been spending sometime thinking about the future of Lillihub. I feel like I have a solid base to launch off of now. And I’m doing my best to not slide into the thought that I should rip it all to pieces and rebuild it with a brand new latest and greatest framework. So I need to step back sometimes and admire what I like most about it. The fact that it streams HTML, that the UI is a bit different but very usable, that there is no build step and its mostly in one file (I know I know, that probably annoys the other developers who’ve glance at the source code)

So what’s up next? This is a simplified “I want” list, not exhaustive and not a promise to build 😉:

• I want to have the highlights incorporated into the bookmarks area and make tagging easier
• I want to add books via one of the book APIs out there
• I want it to better support the IndieWeb
  • Let people bring there own indieauth/micropub endpoints
  • Let the editor have a dropdown to add microformats markup for replies, likes, etc..
  • Microsub client? Integrated with posts?
• Let the PWA accept shares
  • Share a URL? adds it as a bookmark
  • Share copied text? starts a post
  • Share a photo/video? uploads it and starts a post (with the photo/video included). Maybe AI could generate alt text…

The Stats

Lillihub had around 40 users login in the past three weeks.

Final Thoughts

There is a whole new year out there waiting for me. I want to keep playing, keep crafting, and keep my family and friends close.