28/09/2023

What I Learnt

Using my knowledge from other languages, and markdown lanuages, I quickly learnt the basics to create this website. For example from typing in Github flavoured markdown and LaTeX the basic underlying principle of embedding information inside of text to present a enhanced version of what was originally written was not new to me. This is because I have been writting notes in Obsidian and therefore am comfortable with writting text in this style. The harder parts for me were understadning the syntax of Javascript and understanding principles of CSS.

Javascript

This proved most difficult as it a very different structure from the lanuage I regularly code in. Whilst they are both interpreted lanuages and weakly typed, the general syntax is different and required some getting use to. Both support weak typing although to ensure the security of webpages it is recommended to strongly type variables. Although in recent years Javascript has been trying to move away from this inplace of var and const. To a new alternative called let which doesn't required strongly typing the variable type. Allowing for easier coding of Javascript.

CSS

CSS proved to be much simplier and siginificantly more intutive, for the most part, compared to Javascript. Although an area that was difficult to deal with was the unintivtive methods of positioning and centering of elements, simlpy because characteristics of a style could change without making any impact or pushing any error making it difficult to troubleshoot and test. Another difficult aspect was making the website fully responsive to changes in size and shape, requiring me to use specific units that would scale well.

Some Cool Things

I got annoyed from statically typing elements such as the projects page /projects.html and therefore created a script that simply retrieve urls provided in a list in the HTML and proceed to retrieve information progressivly replacing each link with the information from the specific page. Due to the static nature of the website there was no such way to dynamically adjust the website based on the contents on a folder and hence a sort of index was required.

Another cool thing was the animation of the stars, in dark mode, through Javascript which allows each refresh to have a different animation each with different durations and opacities everytime.

Finally, the use of SVGs defined within the HTML allowing for infniitly high quality graphcis in a small file compared to a scalar image. Which also allows for the direct editing of characteristics of said image.

Edit - 2/7/2024

I have started doing further upgrades to the website including the addition of a searchbar. This may sound trivial but on static websites where all the logic behind the website is run locally and cannot be served by a server. This means that other techniques must be used to implement a searchbar. I have created my own searchbar (this is far from perfect but it works) by taking advantage of the /assets/sitemap.xml file. Which provides the website address that would normally be served by a server, then the script will search through all the text in a file and return the suitable websites.