Jan 14th, 2025 -
Changed it up quite a bit now using a new website engine - Hugo. The downside is this one is much less automated. The upside is it looks cleaner and is much harder to break.
This website is now open source, and you can view its source code here.
Nov 12th, 2024 -
It’s been a year and since I quit my teaching job this past summer and no longer have Azure credits, my old website was officially shut down earlier this month and now I’ve decided to really work on this version of the website.
I built this website via an automatic build pipeline from my daily journal in Logseq. Anything I write here in my journal is pushed to a repository on GitLab which has a scheduled task at noon every day to build and update my website. I do this because I had a hard time keeping my previous website updated, as it was an entirely separate thing I had to deal with from my usual daily tasks. This way, I barely have to do anything.
There are however many challenges with the setup. Logseq and its build image are made on an entirely different tech stack than I’m used to. I’ve admittedly done extremely little with javascript in my professional life, so playing with Logseq’s typescript is like trying to read an alien language.
Eventually I’d like to make this website open-source and link everyone to its repository, but right now my whole journal is in that repo, so that won’t be happening until I separate the two.
Note to self, git submodules might be useful
Sep 9th, 2023 -
Sometimes you just want to get away from it all.
That’s what the Cave On Mars is. The ultimate getaway.
This website is a constant work in progress.
The name came from a journal entry from 2016 after writing about wanting to be removed from family drama and USAmerican political bullshit.
The website itself came into being while working for a web hosting and software developing company that I taught for. At first I built the site on our web hosting platform, but when my coworkers started snooping through the projects on my account, I moved it off of our platform and onto Microsoft Azure. Every month, I would get credits from my company to use on Azure, which I sometimes used to host Minecraft servers or containerized webapps, but also to host Cave On Mars.
It was an over-produced, under-utilized website with an unnecessary admin backend and a massively over-developed build pipeline - way too many extra moving parts for one web dev’s sometimes passion project. At least it taught me a few things.
Now the website is developed inside an instance of Logseq which I like to call my “second brain”. The site is hosted on Gitlab, where my second brain’s repo is. New updates, if any, are usually added automatically every day at noon UTC. Unless I’m excited about an update and manually push it. For way too much more info, read How I Made this Second Brain
I considered hosting the website on Neocities which is a beautiful place and I highly recommend it. But my frontend skills have always been lackluster, and I’d rather have all of my stuff in one place.