I spent last weekend coding this blog app and migrating my content over. I apologize for less accessibility, features, and mobile experience, but I just love the aesthetic of plain text and consoles. Just be glad I didn't go with a blocky terminal font. :)
Here are some of the design choices!
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* FILESYSTEM STORE *
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Pesky modern databases! Why would I want to store my content in an obscure chunk of SQL data?! I want my content in txt files! Look at how beautiful this is!
I figured "yearly" was a good indexing point for my amount of content.
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* 60-CHAR WIDTH *
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Have you ever read an RFC document on your phone while having a walk? I usually end up reading in "horizontal" mode--which is awkward to hold and scroll with one hand--because 72 chars in vertical mode ends up as pretty tiny letters. I settled on 60 as a compromise between Desktop and mobile.
Ideally I would say 40-45 would be a good choice for mobile, but at that point of mobile support I may as well go with a variable-width font like everyone else.
Don't you remember the time when nobody even had a phone?
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* CONTENT *
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Terminals are cute, but screenshots are a thousand words, and hyperlinks are pretty convenient, so I added some helper for that. I can add formatting with matchers that are placed in the right column.
Pretty nifty, right??
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* PLAIN PHP *
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Yeah, I'm dumb, and this is not using the best coding standards. I want to play more with Laravel eventually, but I just love that good old unmanageable-at-scale plain PHP feel. It's so fun for small projects.
At least I only have one "bootstrap" line in index.php. Give me some credit?
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* EMAIL *
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I like comment-adding features, but for this blog I'll prefer a 'feedback' route, where you can send me an email, and I'll update something, post about your thoughts, or just reply to you privately if that's cool.
Go ahead and test it out at the bottom of the page. (And if there is one library I'll probably use later, it's something to avoid PHP's primitive mailer.)
Another neat thing is that I can just git commit my text files and a neat webhook git pulls on the webserver side. Nothing quite groundbreaking there, but I love that.
As for content, I'm looking to write more short and sweet posts lately. A bit easier to find inspiration for that.
Oh, and hey, look at the URLs! They're console commands! :)
(Update 2025-01-14: we've migrated again! Back to modern standards!)