The Beta "Blog"

This page holds all of the content and writing that I couldn't be bothered to put in a better place. Eventually I plan on writing about programming, scientific articles, miscellaneous essay topics or whatever else I feel like sharing. You've been warned...

In the meantime, this is just a static HTML page — a more dynamic system is already in the works! That means that I don't have separate pages for posts or anything like that. This is a very temporary solution, so please do forgive how hideous it is.

Total Rewrite?

2018-09-30 – I've decided that the Phoenix framework is a bit overkill for my website. If I want to add a feature to my website, like uploading pictures without manually editing the source code and generating thumbnails, I can't just write some code that does that, I need to dig into the framework and find out how Phoenix wants me to do it. Elixir is odd as well. It's a nice language, but is kinda just a watered-down Haskell with even more inflexible abstraction when it comes to the OTP. The point of writing the code for this website from scratch was to understand as much of the stack as possible. With that said, I am going to start on a rewrite in either Common Lisp, Haskell, or Rust and use only HTTP libraries and tools of equivocally minimal abstraction. This could take a little while, as I have now started my studies at the University of Sheffield, but this website is also laughably simple, so it shouldn't take me long. The void is calling, and it's whispering Haskell... Anyhow, once the rewrite is complete, y'all can look forward to: An actual Contact page, perhaps an actually Attractive™ front page, a proper blog (so I can berate the world further), an About Me section so I can feed my inner lake-gazer, and (if I am feeling extra wild) some client-side code.

2018-10-3 – I think I've decided to do it in Haskell. It's been a little while since I've had a go with it. You can track the progress of the rewrite here.

2018-10-31 – It is done. This web page is being served by a server I wrote. The only library that I used was the Network.Socket library. Check it out here. There is still a long ways to go, this is just a feature-parity milestone. The biggest thing I am missing from Phoenix is templated HTML, but that isn't too much of an annoyance at the moment. This server is still SUPER brittle and doesn't even support POST requests, or any sort of request header. That being said, it serves a static page well.

Front-End Redesign

2019-01-27 – Well, I finally got around to cleaning up the design of the site. I think things look a lot nicer now. This cleaning means that I've deleted some things, however, so I figured I'd include the things I want to keep here.

Here is the nixed snippet about the logo:

Isn't that a neat logo? Made it myself! It's a combination of a pulsar from Conway's Game of Life and the circular structure of a DNA plasmid. It combines my biggest interests! Biotechnology and Computer Science.

I've also been working lots on the back-end. I can handle POST requests now and should only be a couple of working days away from having a functional blog and photo upload system.