Website Updates

A backend overhaul to the website, and a new open-source home.

I've spent the past few days overhauling this website, and I'm rather happy with the result.

The old method I used for populating articles was rather janky -- in short, articles were two PHP files, one for the article, and one for the thumbnail on the homepage. This make updating this website a chore, and as a result, I rarely did. The way the website works now is much better in my estimation -- each article is a row in a database, and the homepage and individual articles are constructed using php. Creating a new article is as simple as adding a row in a database, but more on that later.

I am now happy enough with the code from an architecture perspective to publish my local repository. If you are curious enough to see how the new website works, the code is available on my GitHub. I hope to publish other things on my GitHub, including future electronics projects I have planned that use micro-controllers, and various STLs for other projects.

I also added the ability to upload articles via the website, rather than needing to SFTP into my server to manually edit the database. This makes updating this website way more convenient, but raises security risks. This gave me an opportunity to attempt to implement php and configure a MySQL with security in mind in a low-stakes environment. Implementing the upload feature was made orders of magnitude easier given the backed rework, so it was nice to reap the rewards of the rewrite almost immediately.

There are still more features I would like to implement, and Ill do my best to document those using GitHub issues, but overall I'm happy with my implementation of a blog engine. This exercise has given me a much better understanding of LAMP / MAMP stacks, and MySQL in particular.