Remember when I said that I would write about the books I've read, the games I've played etc. and then didn't post anything for the next 8 months? Yeah, I remember too. Mind you, it wasn't because I haven't read, or played, or watched anything. I did, as much as time would allow, but life has been so busy recently that I haven't really had the time or the energy to update this website. However, it's much calmer now and I can spare some time here and there, hence this update.

So, what's going on?

Well, quite a lot actually. Work has been picking up, so I don't have as much free time in the office as I had before. On top of that, I'm now in the research phase of my PhD, which itself is taking quite a lot of my time at home. I'm also included in several projects some research, some educational. You can see how I would have little personal time.

However, this doesn't mean I don't have any personal time, I do. But so many things (good things!) have been going on in my private life that I have preferred spending the little remaining alone time I have on my hobbies, rather than writing about them.

But things have quieted down, like I've said, and I've been actually wanting to update my site a little bit more, so here we are.

Some cool stuff

There has been some really cool things happening that I would like to share with anyone reading before updates on the website itself.

Firstly, like I've mentioned in the previous section, I'm now in the research phase of my PhD.! I'm very excited to share the dissertation here when its complete. But more importantly for anyone reading that has an interest in maritime, this comes with the side effect of me developing a fully featured ship maneuvering simulator. This tool will be released fully open source in the future, and I will talk more about it here on this site, and in the blog section, in the future.

Secondly, my project Chromora has been picking up some. I have heard back from some users, which means I have users (as with all of my projects, I don't have trackers / analytics, so hearing back is the only way I can know about this)! Moreover, it was selected and featured in the educational materials of SABIS®. I've heard from quite a few people that they've been using it for purposes ranging from studying web development to creating art, and I thought I couldn't be happier until the opportunity arose to aid-even in such a small way-in the education of kids.

That's about it for the stuff I would like to share for now, so let's move onto the stuff about the website.

Spring cleaning

To get myself back in to the habit of updating the site, I started with a little spring cleaning on the site. You may have noticed that there's now a new top level 'Academic' category, and I moved my MSc. dissertation there. In the future, I'll put my pre-publish research papers and hopefully one day my PhD. thesis in there. 'Stuff' is also renamed to 'Various', I just think it reflects what that category is better. I've added two new pages for two game projects I haven't posted here about before, and put all of the unfinished ones in a single post called 'Prototypes'. I've also edited some older posts, not on the blog section but elsewhere, to add a bit more information on the topic of whatever the post is about.

You may have also noticed, especially if you're one of my friends or coworkers which use the services I host on the same server, that the website uptime has improved significantly in the past two weeks or so. That's because I changed my server PC. It used to be a crappy office pre-built that I bought for very cheap, and the bios couldn't handle booting up with a 10tb external HDD attached. Every time the power went out, or it was shut down for any other reason, I would need to plug the HDD out, start the server, and plug it back in after the bios boots the system and before the kernel loads. It was such a hassle! It was also quite the noisy beast.

Since I've bought a new laptop recently, the 10 year old machine I was using before thought it could retire, but alas, it was promoted into being the server machine. It has several advantages compared to the old server. It's much, much more quieter, so much so that it took a while to get used to the silence. The server is set-up in my living room, so this is the most important point for me. Secondly, it has a battery, so even if the power goes out it can stay open for a long while, realistically I probably won't experience an outage long enough for the battery to go empty. And finally, even if it does shutdown, it's not a hassle to restart it, since the bios is much newer than the previous machine and I don't have to play a QTE trying to connect the external HDD. For you, the reader, this all means you'll have more consistent access to the site!

All of this is in service to what's going to come next, so let's talk about that!

What's next?

I have a lot of ideas for what's next for this site. First and foremost of course is that I would like to write more herein the blog! This is the most immediate goal, and the most likely one that I will actually do. The other ideas further below I will talk about in no particular order.

I've been thinking about adding an RSS feed that'll automatically update with new posts, in fact, I've been thinking about this for a long time, ever since I first made this site! There are a couple problems with it though, like I've previously talked about, I'm writing all components of this website by myself. Which means these posts may contain a lot of non-standard HTML tags that are parsed by my own parser, I will have to decide on how to deal with that. Though I could just use the generated post HTML instead to build the feed. I also have to decide what to include, both in "which categories trigger an RSS re-build?" way and "does an edit trigger a refresh or is it only for new posts?" way.

I've also been thinking about adding some sort of reader interaction layer. I'm torn between three options right now, first would be a comment system for each post, second would be a visitors' log and the third would be a mix of both. All have their own pros and cons.

Comments would be great for engagement, as in, let's say what I'm talking about in this post doesn't work 2 years from now, and someone comes across it. They could warn others by commenting that it doesn't work anymore, ask me to update it, or post a new workaround they figured out. Or with this post, they could recommend me a similar book, which I would love to see. This would be great all around, however it comes with some drawbacks. I would either need to build a notification system for myself or periodically check all posts on the website with comments enabled just to make sure nothing uncouth is going on. I would also need to update all pages on the website to implement this new system. I would need to build the architecture that would keep track of the comments related to each post etc. In short, comments would be great, but they would be quite a lot of work.

The second option is a visitors' logbook. I always loved these, it's old school but still very charming I think. If you have seen any before, you know there isn't much to talk about here. It would be another section on the website, where you could leave a short note to me or anyone else that visits the site. The upside is that this would be very easy to implement and moderate, the downside is that it wouldn't be topical. Even if someone posted, say, a correction like aforementioned, the chances of someone else reading the same post, realizing it doesn't work, checking the logbook and finding the fix is very, very low.

The third and final option for now would be a mix of both, somewhat of a text board section on the website where each post would automatically generate a "thread" wherein people can post comments, thoughts or anything else they'd wish to post. The threads would always be automatically created and visitors wouldn't be able to create their own threads. Each post could be updated with a link to its own thread. This would be somewhere in the middle of the previous two options when it comes to implementation difficulty and moderation, and still achievable. It would also be quite unique and a fun project. I'm leaning towards this option the most.

There are other things I have in mind for the site, but the post is already long enough and these are the most significant updates. Stay tuned for more!