Over the last weeks I have implemented various improvements to this site. I have been saving them for a single write-up, because I want to keep the volume of meta-posts low, lest this become another blog about blogging and how I would want to write more next year.
First up is tags. Some blog posts get one or more tags, and I can now give you an overview of all my posts about doom, for example.
I did this first to pave the way for another thing I wanted to do. I have now reposted my x86-64 assembly tutorial Asmtut on this blog, each entry back-dated to its original posting date. This tutorial used to be hosted on Google+, which was never more than a ghost town that is now simply gone.
I have removed "Actually getting started with Portable Native Client" from the front page and reposted it as a blog post. I thought the technology looked fun and promising, and I wanted to keep up with it. Now, it is as dead as Google+. While blog posts can go out of date and be kept for posterity, this is not what I want the fetaured articles on my front page to be like. Besides, the front page layout works a lot better with six articles instead of seven 😉
Snygg uses PNaCl and no longer runs even in Chrome, but I have decided not to remove it. Instead, I will reimplement the game in Rust and compile that to WASM. That will be my third implementation after the first in Python and the second in C++. The rest of that page also needs a refresh. I don't want to wait until everything is ready, so I'm adding a development blog to the Snygg-page and I will publish as I go.
The PlainTalk page deserves some love. I wrote it in 2013, imagining I would build a small site around it. I have never gotten around to that. For this update I have only changed the footer, which used to have links to my presence on Google+ and Bitbucket 😂 I created it before I had this site, but now I do, so now it just links to the front page.
The rest of the article pages have been updated to be built using the same static site generator I use for the blog. They now all have the same general layout, including header and footer, and several inconsistencies have been removed. This makes it easier to improve and update the whole site in one go and it allows me to create more advanced relations between pages, such as showing blog posts for a given tag on a page.
Behind the scenes I have also migrated version control system from Mercurial to Git, prompted by Bitbucket's descision to terminate Mercurial support. Oh, and I have dropped the Bitbucket link from the footer.
Put together this refreshes my site so it's a lot more current, and better fit for interesting updates in the future. Man, this thing is work.
A final meta-comment on this meta-post: I wrote this text before starting on the work it describes, imagining what I would want to do. I have of course had to adjust it as I went, but it was a good way to get started. I had a hard time motivating myself for each individual task because of their relative small impact, but collecting it all in this post made it easier to look at and think "Yes! This is where I want to be!"
