Devlog 59

Oh boy am I excited to write this one!

Lyceum 2 Electric Boogaloo

Welcome to Lyceum 2.0 powered by go-blender! I'm ecstatic to have v1 finished. Some features are:

• Markdown support! No more writing raw HTML
• Classy navigation bar stolen heavily inspired by XXIIVV
• Tree like file structure, eg:

|--
index/
|-- _index.md
|-- about/
    |-- _index.md
    |-- friends.md
    |-- devlog
        |-- _index.md
        |-- devlog-2020
            |-- _index.md
            |-- devlog_57.md
            |-- devlog_58.md
        |-- devlog-2021
        ...

Essentially it's a generic file system. The _index.html files represent the parent folder while all the .md files have their own pages. The navigation bar is made of (usually) 3 columns.

Parent | Current | Child

All three of these are generated dynamically by go-blender during the build phase. I'd become tired of maintaining a massive single folder with all my source files in the previous version. Since I have to manually link files, in case I forgot, well the file's lost now. Folders allow me to track files easily. Another advantage of this folder-based approach is the ease of turning single pages into folders themselves, which is crucial to create a wiki. For eg: I'm going to be restarting drawabox. To add it on the website, all I have to do is create a folder inside art for it and then add my work inside. I can also further create folders for it's multiple lessons. It's recursive! If you can't tell already I love creating folders and organizing things, might be an OCD :p

If you can't tell from the name already, it's also written in Golang!, the previous version used C and the code was, well, horrible (look at your own risk: archived). I will be the first to admit though that go-blender has some rough edges, but it's a huge step up from it's predecessor. I maintained a scratchpad file if you want to know how I went about building it. Might not make a lot of sense, but in it's defense that wasn't its purpose.

Pending features

• RSS support
• Backlink parsing support (Maybe)

Credits

No I'm not smart enough to build something like this! I had help directly and indirectly!

• @neauoire for creating XXIIVV. I consulted the oscean code multiple times for inspiration and the website styling!
• icyphox's vite project and for being an awesome friend in general.
• My mom, even though she didn't understand what I was doing she was always happy to see what I'd made!

Closing thoughts

I love the way Lyceum looks and writing this post in markdown has been bliss. I'm also looking forward to populating it with entries regularly.

• Adding a separate techlog where I can write focused technical posts for things I have on my to-do-list.
• Entries about progress in my hobbies
• Rambling about random things

I love my cozy corner on the internet.