Microblogs, and Refactors, and Feeds... OH MY!

I have made a considerable number of changes to this site behind the scenes since my last update in February.

At that time I had just finished an MVP of a book/author/quote webapp. I've since:

• added a dashboard for you all to be able to view my reading log
• improved the functionality for me to be able to very easily add new books/authors.
  • kicks off a search that shows me images and details of the most likely books based on my criteria
  • pulls data in from google books
• imported
  • all of my documented reading journals since January 2022
  • as many of the books that I could quickly remember reading from before 2022 (MANY are absent)
• added book cover images from google books

Having used this webapp for the last month and a half, it is working pretty well but there are plenty of improvements to make. I'm keeping a log of my wants and will be improving as I am drawn to it. but for now that project's priority has dropped.

As I had started in February, I completed the refactor of the blog, feeds, portfolio, & pages out of what was then the single django webapp. This went much more smoothly than I expected. I don't think there were ANY problems with this refactoring. I also changed several of these items from rich text format to markdown and am much happier with the experience (though there is one annoying bug... this text box grows downward with every key I press).

Towards the end of March, I decided to begin writing poetry and decided to create a place here for easy capture and retention of these "Tears in the Rain". I needed a very low-friction process... so I created a microblog webapp.

Today, I just completed a refactoring of the Feeds functionality to make it more configurable by me on the fly without having to write new code for each new feed... In fact, and I am quite proud of this, I got it to be able to generate RSS, ATOM and JSON, feeds automatically for each entry, which can be setup for any combination of models, and filtered on tags... there are some other features that I have not fully explored yet.

I have also begun to move much of the configuration into data structures and away from hard coding. I won't get into the details here, but it is intended to make management of this site easier of me.

Finally, I reorganized the nav-bar. I have quite a few plans for new pages and I needed to restructure the nav-bar (and my pages app) to make it work without too much headache. Speaking of headaches, on my short list is to revamp the home page by simplifying it... that hero slide show looks nice on a desktop, but is unusable on a phone. And it's unwieldy to maintain. it's gotta go.

Still lots to do, but you gotta remember, I am learning all this as I go along, so I've made many mistakes in the last 3+ months and have cleaned up quite a few already.