HebrXj updates
11-16-24
A utility to make a static copy of my site.
I'm almost at the point where my CMS does everything I want it to do, so the next step is to develop a tool to make a static render of select pages from my dynamic website before I can publish it to Neocities. I'm sure there are a ton of cool and smart ways that it could and should be done, but I want something something really quick that works well enough until I have more time to work on it.
I thought about for a minute and remembered I'm still running everything on a localhost. So what I've ended up doing is running a curl (I use Linux BTW) for each page and directory that I want, then writing it to a static directory and purging anything that would be incompatible with a static site.
Hopefully this will help things go even faster with developing this site. For now the next steps are: 1) get better graphics and colors to make my website less ugly, 2) further automate the process of uploading files to Neocities.
TLDR: Didn't feel like using a real or established static site generator so I made a webscraper to make a static copy of my dynamic site.
HebrXj blog
11-03-24
Development on a custom CMS to help with post management.
This post was made and edited multiple times using a custom CMS made with SQL and a little bit of php (ew).
My CMS currently features a token driven login, a management screen, an editing menu, and a template compatible output. A CMS created post has a labeled author, category, creation date and can allow media to be attached attached media.
Right now it is very minimal. Think message board of microblog. Posts can also be hierarchical, having a parent and children similar to microblogging services like twitter.
I don't expect this to be very popular especially considering this is not static at all and requires a hosted server, but I like it and it's been a lot of fun making it and updating it. I plan to continue updating until it has a similar functionality to other content management systems, but for now this is what I have.
HebrXj blog
10-25-24
This is my second real blog post on here (not sure what happened to the first one). I'm trying to set up a system to automatically sync my blog posts. This can easily be done with a server side script and some JavaScript fetch. But Neocities is incompatible with server-side scripting. That makes things a little bit harder. I could set up some scripting with the Neocities CLI to automatically push an update every night, but I have decided to take the much harder route of making my own static site generator and flattening everything to a static HTML file before I upload it. You may think that it isn't worth it and you would be right, but I really like that sweet sweet dynamic web development and also I'm an engineer so I really appreciate that kind of self inflicted pain.
Be like me, build a dynamic website that no one except for you will be able to appreciate the dynamicness of.
Be like me and go through the painful process of static site generation so you can ruin the dynamicness of your beautifully dynamic website and share it on Neocities.
Be like me and frequently update what is now your new personal website that no one else can see, but only go through the effort of generating and posting a static copy every couple months.