hermiene.net

It's here! The long-awaited total revamp of my website! I call it Concordance. I'm stoked. Most of the changes are, in fact, on the back-end, but they enable me to much more easily maintain my website, and in particular, they enable me to drastically expand it. Most notable for returning viewers is not only the new coat of paint, but also the new navigation bar. It's now a proper tree, with nodes and leafs, which can be as deep as I want it to be. And every page has a canonical URL which is totally separate from its position in the tree, so if I want to re-arrange things in the tree, I can do that without fear of breaking links.

Also new is the sticky breadcrumbs at the top for easily identifying where you are in the tree, which I'm very happy with.

The Library page (formerly Books) has been heavily reworked, now having lots more ways to browse, sort, and filter, thanks to a complete rethinking of how to structure the relations in the database. Without going too much into the details, it involved a lot of normalization and the creation of some junction tables which really should have been there from the beginning (like the separation of author from contributor, and contributor from role), and the implementation of sound keys (particularly foreign keys) to ensure data integrity.

There are many small changes here and there (mostly to do with navigation and styling), but no new content per se. I did finally integrate the two Off-site pages Llamaphobia and USN, which were formerly just their own sub-domains.

For those interested, here's a list of technical things that have changed:

• I made a home-brewed front-loader to resolve URLs and load in proper content, instead of loading header and footer templates into every static page. This means I have full control over what can be reached by a naked URL by putting stuff in a public vs. private section in my web hotel (if I ever change my mind about which section something should be in, I can simply move it). This also means I can make custom plugin helper functions for specific pages that use more advanced routing (like the new Library page, formerly Books). An .htacces file directs legacy URLs to my new front-loader, which handles legacy links, so no old links should be broken. (If they are, please let me know.)
• I now consistently use PHP's PDO (PHP Data Objects) to handle all database interactions, in addition to prepared statements. This is technically not necessary since all database calls that are public-facing (like Search features) are for fetching only, but this is a new layer of security that I didn't have before. (Though the old system did use mysqli::real_escape_string, which was better than nothing, but now with prepared statements, I don't even have to think about it.)
• I use cocur/slugify (with some tweaks) extensively for all URLs, especially for the Library page. For instance, the URLs for all the detail pages of individual books are now in the form {slugged-title-in-kebab-case}--{author-last-name} instead of the old {book_id}. So e.g. 78 now becomes the-caves-of-steel--asimov which is much more readable.
• I upgraded from MathJax v2 to v4 (I skipped v3). There's a lot of new features in v4 that I eventually want to take advantage of, to be explored more thoroughly when I write more math-heavy pages, which is coming.

All this makes me incredibly happy, mainly because I don't have to maintain two separate codebases (a headache), but also because I've streamlined so many janitorial tasks that I previously had to do manually, that I'm free to spend my programming energy on more fun things, like new content!

Say hello to another new page, Twitch! It's a page I've long thought about making, and it's here. It's a work in progress though, but I wanted to push it out quickly so that I have somewhere to write down whatever new ideas I get for it, because I do really want to carve out some time some evenings to be able to stream again! Watch this space...

The spirit of Why Not-ism strikes again! This time I decided to simply upload my (very slim) web site from my university days, and file it under the Off-site section. It's in Norwegian and it's called simply USN (Universitetet i Sør-øst Norge, University of South-Eastern Norway). On it you will find

• two physics simulations written in JavaScript, one for Newton's Cannon and one for understanding various properties of transversal waves, and
• a series of articles and accompanying YouTube videos introducing trigonometry that I made for a didactics course in math.

Some of that stuff might later be incorporated into this site. I would definitely like to play more around with JavaScript and physics simulations!

I also fixed the link in the Off-site section for Llamaphobia, which for the longest time wasn't working! (I have no clue at all for how long, but I found out about it randomly whilst doing janitorial work.) Anyway, now it works.

I also decided to make all the links in the Off-site section open in a new tab via target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" which I believe is the industry standard way of doing it these days. Incidentally, this marks the first time in my web site's history that I'm forcing links to open in new tabs! For the longest time I've been against that practice, and in many ways I still am, but when links are clearly marked as being Off-site (in addition to that little "↗" up-arrow icon) I think it's fair. Not to worry: Those are the only links on my site that work that way!

Say hello to a completely new page, Scribbles, currently filed under Readings! For now there's not too much there except for three small "essays" I wrote back in 2009 (to call them actual essays is perhaps to ask too much). I randomly remembered that I wrote them, and thought "why not put them up?"

I also added a new section to the Links page, Gaming blogs. Currently there's only one entry, The CRPG Addict, and I'm not at all sure there'll be more links to come. In any event, that seemed a logical place to put that link, and I wanted to recommend people take a look at his blog, as it's really interesting to follow along on his path! He's on a quest to play every CRPG ever made, something that's mad, yes, but why not? (This, by the way, is just one of my current obsessions. Reading through his entire back catalog takes time, but I'm having way too much fun to stop!)

Until next time.

Life is churning along pleasantly enough, but I don't feel I pay enough attention to my web site, which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'd like for it to be worked on more frequently from time to time. And who's working on it? Well, just little ol' me! So what can I do about? Well, hopefully, just this: pushing out an update.

The fact of the matter is that it's very much on my mind — a lot — and I do have plans for it — many — but... Well, no buts. I'm busy, yes, and I do have limited spare time, yes, but I also prioritize my dwindling free time on Other Things (TM), and some of those Other Things are not so important that they can't be dispensed with or cut down on to make way for more energy spent on the site.

Another thing that's bugging me regarding this personal decades-long project of mine is, well, I'm no longer too sure what I want this site to be, what I want to showcase, what I want to revise, etc. Suffice it to say that I'm very much thinking about it.

So is this just another post saying "I'm still alive?" In a way, yes. I don't have anything particularly new to write about, or showcase, or anything like that. Speaking of which, that's another thing: Do I want my news posts to just be status updates? Not really. I would really like to get back into a writing groove, a reading groove, which I'm not really in at the moment. I think I can use my website much more as a creative playground. I'd like that.

I do (very) occasionally get feedback on my web site in the form of E-mails, and I love that, because they're usually in the form of a thank-you note, and that pushes me on! So if you're reading this right now and thinking of shooting some text my way, hey, go for it! I'm not exactly inundated with E-mails (except junk and newsletters), so feel free!

Hopefully, the next update will see some new work on the Books page! Here's hoping.

A year has gone by, and not a single update. Shame! So then, what's up?

I've put my Twitch streaming endeavor on pause, but it's still on my mind. It was a sort of experiment to see how I liked it, and how long I would like to keep it up. The truth is that I love streaming, and I do have plans to continue, but there are simply too many things happening in my life these days to make it a priority. In particular (and to recap a bit), this May I finished up my Master's Thesis, and finally got my degree as a science teacher. Then, June and July were more or less spent moving across the country, in addition to job hunting. The job hunt paid off! I'm now a bona fide teacher, and it feels wonderful to finally be working! Onwards and upwards.

So things are starting to stabilize and settle down, meaning I'll have more time to focus on my hobbies. (Well, as much time as a full-time working father of two and husband can reasonably hope to get!) My priority is getting all those features and quality-of-life updates for my Books page implemented. (See the news entry for September 17, 2022 for a list.) I have in fact been working on and off on cleaning up the backend for this to be a reality for the past couple of months, but there's nothing to show for it yet.

Also, I noticed something I forgot to do, namely to add a link to the Off-site section of the navbar to my Discord server, so if you feel so inclined, head over and say "hi!"

There's been a slight change to my Twitch streaming schedule: instead of every Tuesday and Thursday, I'll now be streaming every Monday and Wednesday instead (still at 7pm CET).

I've begun experimenting with streaming on Twitch! I'm currently doing a completionist playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Origins; check out my Twitch channel for live streams and VODs, and my YouTube channel for the archived Let's Plays. My plan is to play through a bunch of my favorite games in the time to come. Naturally, these links are also in the Off-site section of the navigation bar.

My current schedule for streaming is Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7pm CET until whenever I decide to quit for the night. I usually stream for about three hours or so.

My Books page has been redesigned. Now, most of the books (or ways to browse the books) are hidden behind their own links (or "sub-pages"). This makes the page look a little small, but of course, all the real content is still there. I realize this might make browsing the books a little more cumbersome, but the page is not done yet; I just wanted to push the current (working) iteration out the door, giving myself more incentive to work on the new features, faster!

What's coming:

• Search bar with accompanying drop-down menu to specify where to search (title, author, category, etc.)
• A separate advanced search page (my hope is to make this a very sleek direct interface with the database itself)
• Lists of various custom "book shelves" (for lack of a better word)

My web site has definitely taken a back seat in my life lately, with school work and family life taking up the majority of my waking hours, although I never forget about it. I want to keep updating it and working on it for as long as I'm capable, and I'm kind of proud that I've had it running since 2003, more or less in its current state (modulo some culling of pages and rewrites of the back end). It's amazing to think that next year it'll be 20 years old!

I added a new section to the Books page, Universes and Series, where I split all the series into those that are associated with a universe, and those that aren't. I tried my best to do this correctly, using The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and various wikis for reference. Hopefully this makes everything a little more neat and structured. I also hid the list of authors, publishers, and books behind their own links, since the Books page itself became extremely long now that all the books are viewable.