A note: this is very outdated! "Website v4" has been gone for a while now. If you want to see what it was like, you can find a release here. If you want to see my [initial] thoughts on the current website, please see my post on website v5.

Welcome to the fourth iteration of my website, website v4! There's a bunch of new things here, a /projects/ section, a /blog/ section, with posts now written in Markdown, and compiled using gray-matter and showdown. I'm surprised it's actually working.

You can probably find the project page, where I'll go more in detail about the behind the scenes of it all around here somewhere. Here, I'll talk about why I rewrote my site, and some things I learned. Please note that I am a relatively new "developer" with an extraordinary lack of experience. Cool? Cool.

1. You need to know the basics of a language to write in it

I tried to write the site compiler in C# originally. The issue with that is that I don't know C#. So there's a nice little pro tip.

2. <div>s are really neat.

I think I began to use them a lot more, especially with the progress bars and all the sort. They're very helpful, especially with the mess that is "me writing CSS" and also inheritance, or something like that.

I'm done with the list, I'm just going to write down some of my other thoughts.

I really... didn't know what I was doing half this time. I wrote some stuff, I looked at reference, and the entire process (and result, but more on that later,) was a giant disorganized mess.

I suppose I should thank some sites, but more specifically: the people who contribute to the MDN Web Docs and Stack Overflow - for wannabe developers like myself, your contributions make for great reference material. Thanks!

But more on the result - it's a mess. I dread looking at the "code" again - it's an amalgamation of multi-line HTML strings, many repeated things that could probably be simplified, stored in variables, or consolidated into functions - but I didn't do that. Which may have been why this took so long. Maybe when I finish writing this, and go to compile it, there's going to be another issue somewhere, and it's going to take me another few hours to solve it. That'll be... great.

I did feel like I learned quite an amount from this, though. I'll probably have to look back through some fundamentals, but I'll probably go off to write something bigger after this. I might build a better Discord bot this time! Those are always fun to write.

And just to test some more elements of the compiler/markdownjs, here's a list of things I should learn:

• How to debug code (especially node.js)
• Writing unit tests (and tests in general)
• Actually organizing and planning code

That's all.

I'm done here.

If you're reading this, I'm amazed. Thanks. I hope you got a chuckle out of this.

See ya next time?

(Oh, and follow me on Twitter and look at other of my crimes against humanity on my GitHub profile.)