Razorback's Next Leap Forward

January 8, 2023 at 8:25 PM (Updated on January 8, 2023 at 8:27 PM)
Category: Site Related

Over the last week, I've made some drastic changes to the underlying workings of Razorback. It started off with putting a few of PHP 8.2's new features to good use so as to shave off annoying lines of code, but has since grown into a serious charge into clearing out more of the leftovers from when this site launched as being purely comprised of static HTML pages.

Important RSS Update

To bring it upfront, the static RSS feed that was located at rss.xml is now DEPRECATED. I do not expect to be updating it anymore. As part of the massive restructuring of the scripts that have been residing on here, I've consolidated all RSS pages to just one, located at rss.php in the site's root directory. By default, this feed will retrieve everything from blips and blog posts to announcements of varying sorts, but for those who'd prefer to follow only specific sets of content, it can do that as well through GET arguments. The RSS buttons scattered about have been updated to make use of them.

To stay on top of all of the latest updates to this site from here on out, make sure you load the new feed into your RSS reader! Because this new feed is designed to be a lot more dynamic, its scope will expand as more pages are adapted to it down the line.

If you are following the other RSS feeds, there is a chance you may see a bunch of duplicate entries pop up now. Should you experience issues with any of the feeds, let me know.

The Blog Gets Revamped

If you've seen the URL for this page, you may have noticed it's using a "clean" URL. That's just a part of the drastic streamlining I've also been doing over here. As many regulars here would know, last year was severely parched of blog posts for a couple of reasons - one, I was starting to get the impression that people really hated the way I write, and two, putting new articles in place by hand has grown incredibly tedious.

Because of this, I've went ahead and converted the articles into a format that can be digested by a database, making them much easier to browse, organize, and publish. On my own machine, I've written some Bash scripts to automate the process of publishing blog posts as well as other updates of varying types. With that, hopefully now it should be a lot more encouraging for me to get back on track with this.

On top of that, articles are now included in search queries, and it is now possible to comment on the older articles. The guides have not yet been ported over to the database, but that is planned for the future. As for the project pages, I'm expecting to keep them largely static, though we'll see where that ends up going.

Other Changes

Apart from that, your experience in browsing Razorback should remain much the same as before. It's still got the same old layout as always, though I have applied a few minor tweaks to the styling as part of another file I've reworked. The stylesheet is now one PHP file that adjusts itself accordingly to whether you're using white or black mode. I also finally got the issue with the font size turning up really small on one browser sorted out, so most everything should be easier to read.

After being tied up so much in 8086 assembly programming and getting nearly 300 videos cataloged on this site, it's great to finally get back around to bringing another idea I had almost forgotten about to action. Will there be a much greater outpouring of posts now? That is still yet to be seen, as I do have other things I need to tend to. I haven't forgotten about Quacker and would like to get back on that at some point. The quality of life improvements implanted here should better the chances of considerably more regular output.

I'm telling you, Bash scripting is a lifesaver. Its unbelievable versatility makes pretty much anything possible. No stupid web interface needed for making posts! You ought to try it yourself at some point and see what you can do with it.

Just for the hell of it, here's a screenshot of when I was working on this update, getting the code for the top buttons into a foreach loop...

Comments

Year of the cat, year of the catfish (because Kugee loves fish!).

Xnmcv: ...or like a cat... (See Wikipedia article about Chinese zodiac)

May Razorback leap forward like a rabbit/bunny! Hop!

I never realized the font size being small was an issue to begin with. When I first saw that all the text was made to be a bit larger, it was a bit jarring to look at admittedly - though it's still easy to get used to, while also helping with readability for some.

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