I Finally Made A Blog!

For several years now, I've thought about making a blog. I even tried making a Wordpress blog my freshman year of undergrad. But I found I never had anything worth blogging about. Now I have much more knowledge and experience. This has given me several ideas for interesting blog posts. So, I decided to finally make a blog.

But I wasn't about to just spin up a Wordpress blog. That's boring. I'm a programmer, I can do better. So, I decided to make a simple, lightweight custom blog system here on my website. It wasn't hard, either. Every blog post is a folder with a metadata file and a file for the actual blog post. The index of my blog iterates over every folder in the Blogs directory, reads the metadata, and creates a list of blog posts with links to each individual post (using a GET parameter for the title). When you click on a blog post, the title is read from the GET request parameters. The metadata and content for that post are then read and displayed.

Yeah, it's very simple. Definitely not enterprise level, but I don't need that. Elaborate code architecture makes sense for large-scale applications with hundreds of developers and hundreds of thousands of users. But I don't need that level of engineering for my simple blog. The blog system uses less than 100 lines of C# code, which is pretty neat.

There are some features I'll probably add in the future. If I write enough blog posts, I'll need to create a paging system when displaying blog posts so the page isn't absurdly long. That's not hard, and I've done something similar in a previous project. But I just haven't needed it yet here. A comments system would also be nice. I wouldn't want to create a full accounts system because security is very hard to get right, but a simple system wouldn't need accounts. I could also use Google SSO to circumvent security concerns. We'll see.

I have some interesting blog posts I'd like to write, including:

• A series on Markov chains, building up to an accessible explanation of my senior thesis research on Markov chains applied to air quality data.
• A post about procedural dungeon generation in my roguelike game Wypthar's Tomb
• A post about the intuition behind Dijkstra's Algorithm (most blog posts and even some class materials I see focus on the mechanical steps of the algorithm without explaining why the steps work)
• A design comparison of leveling systems in Skyrim and Oblivion and my personal thoughts and experience

I'll sure think of more blog ideas in the future, too. So, keep an eye out for interesting blog posts about computer science, math, programming, game development, and maybe other topics!