I've been meaning to get my little corner of the web up and running for a while now. As of this writing, most of this website doesn't work. Things are rendering, so that's really neat, I need to implement pagination and wire the multiple sections up, but for now I just wanted to get the bare bones working. On the backend I'm just parsing though a folder of markdown documents. Each one is formatted with a date, time and title.

2013-10-24-18-24-here-is-a-totally-cool-title

This honestly might have some ramifications, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. For right now the only limitation seems to be the inability to include colons or forward slashes in my titles, but anything else (if I'm remembering correctly) should be kosher, even crazy unicode characters. On the backend this is a super-simple express app, with handlebars templates (I'm using handlebars with express through consolidate. Markdown is parsed using marked, and the code (for now) is being highlighted with highlight.js. The super awesome moment library is helping me out with date parsing. The hardest part of building new things with nodejs is finding what libaries are currently supported (and which ones are hip, because that's what's really important). I think in the future I see some sort of management software that's dealing with uploads and file naming, which I honestly think is a much better solution than admin-style interfaces. I hate web administration panels. Markdown is where it's at.

I should get the rest of this working in the next day or two, and should have enough time to get an existsing project or two up on the projects page before I have to succumb to cold death grip of finals. I'm really looking forward to have a neat little place to document the things I've done, and the things I'm working on. For some reason I tend to have more motivation when I know people are going to see the things I'm doing. Maybe this will spare all my friends from the screenshots of code and applications I'm always throwing up on Facebook.

to the future

--matt