initial commit: my blog is now live!

after months of procrastination, i've finally finished the first version of my blog!

welcome to my blog!

honestly, finding the time (and more importantly, the energy) to work on personal stuff is hard with a day-job. i'm even prouder of myself that i actually managed to complete a project for once!!

how this all works

this is actually a completely static site! the search function just searches through a pre-generated json-array of all articles that are live. the "featured article" on the main page is determined by a seeded random number generator which takes the current date as a starting seed.

mostly python

again, this is a static site. so i need a static site generator for some basic templating and stuff. i wrote all of that with a few python scripts, which basically manipulate some files, read the meta data, generate the table of contents, and makes a big list of all articles. then it creates the article pages, the rss feed, and all the other pages that belong to the blog.

oh, yeah, rss!

if you have an rss reader, i can highly recommend subscribing to the rss feed of this blog! (and please tell me if something doesn't work there lol). i wrote the rss feed generator myself as well. surprisingly, there are very little rss feed generator libraries out there. so i just had to do it myself.
honestly, that was pretty fun though! i ended up learning a bunch about it. i can absolutely recommend taking a brief look at the official docs on harvards website, its so delightfully web 1.0.
you can find it here!

js random

mentioned it before, but the article of the day is determined by a pseudo rng.
did you know that JS does not have a standard for random number generation? every browser just kind of does its own thing there. therefore, there's also no pseudo-random number generator in JS.
i just kind of ended up copying some code from stackoverflow, just like the universe intended. (go look at the source code for the index page if youre curious!)

what i've got planned

well, just like my main website, i wanna add some easter eggs. there's very little right now, because i mainly wanted to get this thing finished.
also, maybe i'll make the css a little prettier, a full article may read a little clumsily on it so far. but i'll figure it out over time!

sneak peek

i've got some articles in the works that i'll release as i finish them :3

ai disclosure

this blog was 100% written by AI (alex's intelligence). no amount of LLM content was used in the making of this blog. this is all written by genuine stupidity :3
i used a fair bit of stack overflow, the harvard rss docs, mozilla developer network, and the python documentation, though. also, shoutout to this blog article for helping me figure out how to get the rfc #822 dates required for rss. it's funny that someone else already had the exact same problem as i did! :D