The New Racc.at Blog
I've updated the blog, woohoo! It went ignored for a very long time now and I thought a fresh coat of paint was long overdue.
Theming
I've updated the blog to look more like the rest of the site, the home page and the ask box had already been updated last year, but the blog was left ignored (and even removed from the home page) for a long time.
The Games page still sports that old look, though. I should probably focus on that next, but let's take it one step at a time.
Changes under the hood
The changes I've made are not only visual, let's take a closer look at what exactly I did:
The actual Posting part
I'm still using a little script of mine to upload blog posts, it opens up vim and I write away, but I've made a big change. The blog is now formatted using Markdown! Previously, I was writing each blog post with HTML directly, which was kind of a hassle and made writing longer posts a pain.
I'm now making use of commonmark.js to convert the original Markdown post stored in my server's database to HTML your browser can display.
If I really need to, I can still write HTML directly for some fancy formatting, but in most cases, the Markdown is enough.
The reading part
The previous blog main page was rendered entirely on the server side, but now it's rendered on the client side, with an extra request made to the racc.at public API. The API for my blog posts has been available for a long time already, but it's now being used on the actual site, yay!
Still a work in progress
I've implemented the bare minimum, but there are still some features that were available on the previous blog page and aren't available anymore, and some that I plan on implementing later on.
Here's the current to-do!
- Comments and comment count
- Timestamps
- Individual pages for posts
- Pagination
- Preview on Embeds (OpenGraph, for Discord and the like)
I've made some more progress! This'll be on par in functionality to the old blog soon.
What about the old blog?
It's still around, but I've made it unavailable. All the posts from the previous incarnation of the racc.at blog have been marked to not be displayed. I might change my mind about this at some point in the future, or never.
Probably never!
If you really are that interested in looking at the old posts, though, you can probably figure it out, they're still accessible... ;)