new Blog();
I've made a new blog, but why am I writing an entire Post about it? you ask, well, this blog is kinda special.
1. Technical stuff
This blog uses some weird but fun tricks to enhance user experience.
1.1 LiveLoading
As you may have noticed, you can navigate this entire website without one complete page reload. Some of you may know this as LiveLoading from, for example the Phoenix elixir framework, but then some of you may also notice that this site is hosted on github pages, which is a statice site hosting service, but using LiveLoading, which is commonly implemented using websockets, requires a dynamic page/a webserver that you can control. Not having any of that but wanting LiveLoading, I needed to implement some super janky workaround.
LiveLoading basically gets data via websockets and injects it into the DOM. So to imitate that, I'd just need to get some data via an async connection and get it into the DOM. I looked around and found my inspiration at astros "hydrating islands" feature, but instead of doing that to only part of the website I would "hydrate" the entire page.
I started writing a prototype that reads a html file and via the HTMX API I parsed the html and replaced the current head and body tags with the parsed ones. Super janky, I know, but it works beautifully.
1.2 Bit-Font
For many this might not be very interesting, but I did get asked how I got a Bit font to work, so I think its a good idea to explain what is going on
This isn't a bit font, because, as of writing this, bit fonts are ignored by all modern browsers. The font I'm using is the "IBM-BIOS" font as a normal .woff file. I found the font on this amazing website.
2. But why even make a new blog?
Besides having all these techincal upgrades that I've talked about above, my old blog was a template called fuwari, which, being a template, didn't look like I wanted it to. I did use the template under the excuse of "I'm a systems dev I can't be bothered with web development", though this eventually collapsed in on itself when I found tmpout.sh, which is a website made by ELF hackers, so pretty low-level stuff, and they've made an amazing looking page, so amazing in fact that I it was my main inspiration for this page (which you might've already noticed).
I also love mystery, and with this very simple design I wanted to create a little piece of the old Internet that was still filled with much mystery and less big cooperations or ads.
thats all from me,
Love you all <3
-apy