At Last, Blog!

I've finally managed to finish setting up my blog. I've been meaning to create one for a while now, but never found the drive to do it properly. Then I found the IndieWeb movement, so I thought, "why not?".

Why Blog?

Why indeed.

I tinker a lot in my free time. Mostly I do stupid stuff (What if you allocate memory and dump it as an image file? What would that uninitialized memory look like? Spoiler: Looks just like my LinkedIn profile banner.), do some recreational programming here and there. But I've been lacking a motivation lately to play around with this sort of stuff. Also, doing things but not documenting them started to bite me; some useful tidbits of knowledge just gets lost to time. Rediscovering stuff gets tiring after a while.

Couple of birds, singular stone. I feel that having a blog and writing about these sort of things will reignite that motivation. I'm also hoping for a side effect that having some sort of public notebook about programming prove beneficial, somewhere down the road.

On top of that, game development is about solving problems anyway, and I've solved (or at least tried to solve) many over the years. Why not braindump them here and provide some value to someone else along the way?

Create What You Need

Initially my goal was to use a static site generator. Then I read this and decided to whip up a simple web server myself in C#. How hard that could be?

Turns out, it is pretty straightforward. C# has its own HTTP server, so all that I had to code is some static file serving and a basic routing handler logic.

I ain't going to code the HTTP server from scratch, no. Maybe later.

I wanted to author my posts in markdown so I looked around for a markdown engine in C# and came across MarkDig. After adding it to the project, I've written a simple route handler that takes the posts, extracts title from the first line, extracts the unix timestamp from the second line, then converts the markdown to html using MarkDig, and finally injects title & date into the template. Whew!

I initially wanted to extract timestamps from the files but platform differences and gotchas were ruining it for me, so I'm manually entering timestamps for the files for now.

It's pretty barebones, but handles my usecase. Using C# is a delight, so all in all it was a fun project. I don't think I'll be adding more features to it, but who knows? One thing that would be nice to have is a file watcher that updates the post cache if any file is modified or new one is added. But restarting the server works for now.

Working with raw HTML and CSS was also an interesting experience. It wasn't that hard to whip up a simple design, but I get why there's a ton of tools around styling webpages.

Conclusion

It seems that at least this project motivated me enough to write a simple blogging web app & writing about it, so the system works for now. Anyway, thank you for your time. You can browse the source code here. Here's to many more blog posts!