Redux

As a web developer, I like to build and rebuild websites. My own website is no different. Things might be a little screwy around here for a while as I continue to develop this site. That said, I have no master plan for this site, other than being a place for me to record a few thoughts/notes in blog posts, short form status updates and bookmarks.

The back-end for this site is written in PHP and uses the CodeIgniter 4 framework. Blog posts are written in Markdown and converted to HTML using the PHP CommonMark library. I've created my own editor for this, but it's nothing out of the ordinary, just a standard input for titles, a text area for the markdown and various other options for meta data etc.

Status updates are also written via a custom editor and in POSSE fashion they are syndicated to my chosen Mastodon instance at indieweb.social. At some point in the future, I may spend a little more time to fully connect this site to the Fediverse via the ActivityPub protocol, but for the time being I am happy for it to remain syndicated only.

My bookmarks could be thought of as a trail of digital breadcrumbs. I tend to bookmark stuff that I find interesting and I try to categorise them with my folksonomy of tags. I quite often find myself remembering a website or service, but not quite remembering its name or URL, so I'm hoping that my bookmarks will help fix that. For ease of use, I've created a custom browser extension that works with both Google Chrome and Firefox. When I come across a website that interests me, I click a button in my browser's toolbar and a window pops open with the website's title and URL ready for me to save. It's super simple and ease to use.

On the front-end, this site uses a customised Bootstrap theme and jQuery handles any JavaScript interactivity (although I have tried to keep this minimal.) I opted for Bootstrap and jQuery as I use these in my day job and I wanted to get something up and running quickly. I'm not ashamed to admit that I still love using jQuery at the end of 2023.

This website is hosted on a Linode VPS and runs Debian.

If you have any questions and would like to know more, feel free to get in touch.