a little bit on website development. (Patreon)

hi! it's been a hot minute. let's talk about web development.

so over the course of the last year or so, i've been really running a gauntlet of web development. i first learned web development in 2009. the game looked different then. that was a world of lampstack and php, of me not knowing how to use my computer to its fullest because i was 13, of netbooks, the precursor to chromebooks.

this last year has been me biking in the fast lane after only learning as a child. catching up to the web space has been a trip and a half. stuff like overfetching in PHP is fine - inefficient, but safe, that data never leaves the server - but overfetching in next.js... not so much okay.

speaking of security issues, i've wanted to rewrite the entire bdth site, for a lot of reasons. i was never especially happy with the site as it was, and it doesn't make use of a lot of features of the web that i think it would really benefit from! so let's talk rewrites!

here's a fun behind the scenes. this is what the bdth site dashboard looks like!

and here's a fun story to go with it: the little icons you see there are loaded every time you, the reader, load a page, despite me not using those icons anywhere else on the site, because the bdth site is broadly... not very efficient or robust. because i load them on every page load for every viewer, and the site sends you a full page on every page click, it quickly racked up clicks. the library provider sent me an email, saying "hey, i noticed you're loading this site X times per month. come back when you're a little mmmmmmmm richer..." and i got mad not because they were asking me to pay up, but because i could reverse engineer the number of readers i averaged from the number they provided. it made me so mad i pirated the library.

the new bdth backend looks like this.

keen-eyed viewers will look at this and say "wait, that's beloved markdown notebook app, obsidian.md". and keen-eyed viewers would be right. the big shift to use obsidian as a back-end CMS has a lot of motivations behind it, but one of them is that the new BDTH site is completely static - there's no need for databases, or communication with a server for any reason other than content delivery at all. this means that i can sincerely consider sites like neocities or nekoweb as hosts for bdth. i love my current webhost, but part of the reason the bdth site is the way it is now is because i wanted flexibility in hosts. there is nothing more flexible than a static site with no backend requirements.

along with that, hot module reload and real-time updating makes proofreading updates almost entirely painless - if something looks wrong, it's trivial to fix it. getting content onto the site is as easy as dragging and dropping a file into obsidian.

i don't have an ETA on when this is done - there's a lot of stuff i still need to fix before it's ready to go. pages with HTML5 animations that communicate through iframes (like Jade: Fix radio tower.) are broken, pages with embedded twine games (the page before Join memo., Jade: Draw Karkat.) are broken. there's still a lot of work to do in making sure it all works.

but it's exciting! it really opens up a lot of opportunities to make the most of the medium of the web, in a way that i think a lot of homestuck works are really pushing to do.

and of course, this is not by any means a promise, but something i would love to do at some point is create a sort of redistributable, downloadable program that can build something like BDTH, a webcomic that is made like a video game.

"The medium is the message." - ancient satyr philosopher, Mr. Beast.

i am 100% sure he said that.