Hewwo World! - About starting this blog and more

I've had moments when I thought that I could make a blog post about something, like a recent event for example, but didn't have a blog. That also caused me to somewhat want to start one, although I was(and still kinda am as of writing this) unsure about that. But I decided that I'll spend time to learn more about RSS and then program a web viewer for it for my website, so now that it's done I'm not going to abandon it. I'm not entirely sure what I will write about here yet, but I think those moments that I described earlier might be one of the answers for that. I also have like two specific ideas of what I might write about in the future, but whether I will is not guaranteed.

Earlier I mentioned making an RSS web viewer, it's a small project of mine made as a part of this website, therefore it's not listed on the homepage of my website. It's also mostly a backend project, made using PHP, that's because I avoid making my personal website dependant on JavaScript code(or even using it at all, with which I have been successful so far), because some FOSS people prefer to have JavaScript disabled in their browsers due to privacy reasons. And as I prefer frontend development, I don't have a lot of knowledge in backend nor will to write very high quality code in it. I had a bit of the latter when making the Calendar by k327 webapp, but after that, not anymore. As to why I write in PHP when I have to write backend, that's because I was taught the basics at school which were enough for me to be able to write some code in it along with some looking up specific things on the internet, which I also had to do while writing the RSS viewer by the way, for example how to read an XML file using PHP. Although I wanted to try a different technology at first back when making the calendar webapp, it seemed like too much of a change and too much to learn just for some backend code. What I wanted to try was Express.js by the way. But now, knowing what happened afterwards, I'm not sure whether that was the right decision, as combining PHP with Vite was not very easy either, and also less documented. And now, here I am, with a bit of PHP code in my personal website. In addition to the RSS viewer, there's also PHP on my website used for loading the 88x31 buttons. But back to the RSS viewer itself, it's done the way that I update the rss.xml file manually, upload it to my web server, and the web viewer loads it from there. The rss.xml file can obviously also be read using an RSS viewer, you can get a link to it on the page with the list of blog posts, it's called an RSS feed there. The viewer is licensed on AGPLv3 like the rest of my website, and is in the Codeberg repository along with it, so in case anyone wants to use it on their own website, feel free to as long as you're going to respect the license. One thing to note about it though is that my website's URL is hardcoded in it as it isn't a standalone project but rather a part of my website, so look for that and replace it with yours. You'd also probably want to modify it at least a bit to fit well on your website anyway.

Either way, we've reached the end of this blog post. It turned out a bit more lenghty than I expected as I decided to write about more than just the announcement(which is fine, and I speculate that similar situations might take place in future blog posts as well), so if you lasted until this moment, thank you for reading, have a nice day or night, and I hope to see you here again on future posts.

Published on 14 Feb 2025 17:25 UTC