2025-01-29
The home server that was hosting Tyrland.se, currently only found at http://158.174.115.144/ has recently had issues meaning I had to shut it down. It seems like the fan started developing problems with it's sensor, causing the server to run the fan at max, as suddenly the server couldn't tell how fast the fan was going. I am kind of conflicted regarding this failure: on one hand, it's bad that the server's fan is failing, but on the other, good riddance. That fan has been noisy since forever, and so I'm glad to replace it. Unfortunately these issues developed the day before a skiing trip, meaning repairs will have to wait until I get home from said trip. I should hopefully be able to get the server up and running again in not too long, but this was definitely annoying.
2025-01-29
Such is the state of Tyrland.se right now, there have been massive
improvements in the backend of the site, performance, and QoL
improvements for maintaining and updating the site. Now the site
almost exclusively uses index.php-files instead of
[whatever].htm-files, meaning you no longer see the file extension
unless you specifically navigate to it. It should also be noted that
the site is almost completely non-functional using local browsing
now that most files use PHP, although maybe you could install PHP on
your dev environment, I cannot be bothered. These are all great
additions, but what's next? What's the next big improvement/feature?
Well, I don't know. DungeonPlanner still needs doing, but the
big thing there is doing the backend, which I have been struggling to
do for a while, and my motivation has been waning significantly,
meaning it might take a while to finally get DungeonPlanner
operational, but it should be operational sometime, just not in
the near future. Aside from that, however, a rework of the main
page would be in order at some point, perhaps to make it a little
bit more useful.
2025-01-29
Now, I'm putting my attention on DungeonPlanner, making the webpages that will become DungeonPlanner, and figuring out how it will work. It's a long road ahead to get DungeonPlanner working, but many of the UIs are already mostly finished, although no backend logic exists yet to make the pages functional. Currently, I'll keep slowly working on it until I have a finished product.
2025-01-23
It's been a while, but now I'm working more actively on the site. I've been trying to set up a github repo on the server to make development easier, but I haven't had any particular luck getting that to work. Before now, the site used a space image I drew for the navbar and a tiny tileable space background that ended up looking like Minecraft obsidian. This was ok, but I didn't like it. I wanted a more interesting background to look at, and the navbar had some subtle issues with rendering the background image. The new look dawned upon me when I was browsing apple.com one day, and noticed that their navbar has a blur effect. That got me very curious, how might they be doing that? Well, it turns out it was stupidly simple to implement, just set backdrop-filter to blur(5px), and the background became blurred! So, now the site uses this Windows Aero-esque design which I find far more appealing. I also found a nice background image which I could press down into just 38kb, so the background is now also interesting to look at, just as I wanted.
2024-11-14
I pride myself on my site not using any JavaScript, and using cookies only for remembering user settings and such. (Although I don't currently do this) I've always been annoyed by the ridiculous use of cookies, JavaScript and tracking in most websites, and feel like it's really difficult not to have your every movement tracked and logged by huge companies, just to make more money. We are starting to see more and more data breaches nowadays as well, which really highlights how user privacy has become so much more important now. Therefore I set myself the goal not to use JavaScript in any of the site, using server-side PHP as a replacement where absolutely necessary.
2024-10-15
The site is public since thursday, but I haven't been finding the energy to work on it. I think I'll leave it and move on to other things right now, and work on it again when I find the energy to do so. I've also been pretty bad at keeping the production version up-to-date with the development version, and transferring it is currently kind of a pain to do, so I really need to improve that.
2024-10-09
The site will soon be going live!
ISP rubbish is finished after some back-and-forth, and DNS+Certs
shouldn't be that difficult, now that that hurdle is done.
I have been dwelling over the background however, the tileable 32x32
image I currently use is nice, however I have my qualms about it, and
I might replace it with a larger image later, but that also conflicts
with my goal to keep the site under 100kB. I'll have to think about
this, but for now the tiled background will stay.
2024-10-02
At this point I have created a basic site that can do most of what I want to accomplish, but it's still quite boring. I definitely need to add some more fun things to the site, and maybe go somewhat crazy with the colours, but all in all it's pretty good. Just gotta hope that my ISP can hurry up with their part so that the site can actually go live.