My first Projects

I started with this blog that you are reading this on now. I learnt a lot making this. Mainly that I should have just used a static site generator. Of course I actually learnt all about Django. The only Django application I had made before this was the polls app in the tutorial and that just kinda confused me but gave me a good starting point. For some unknown reason I also messed with caching for this website. That was a silly idea but I now understand how hard caching is. Turns out, you don't need it for a blog! I also used an ungodly amount of Django applications to help. Even the tags are a django app, the only thing that's not really is the auth and the actual blog itself. Even the auth is using django-axes for auth logging and a "fail2ban-like" (I still like this app). The stackoverflow editor is cool though.

The blog also has a silly amount of features for a personal website. I can edit posts, schedule them, embed javascript, tag posts, a microlog, an author page(it's literally only me!).

Something useful?

Next I worked on Youtubetopodcast.com This actually worked very well and got a fair amount of traction. I posted on Reddit about it then went to sleep and woke up with about 200 registered users which was an amazing feeling that I am always striving to replicate. The post had gone viral on the /r/productivity subreddit with me getting my first gold (thanks kind stranger 🤮). However it was difficult if not impossible to monetise and I kept getting ip banned by youtube and it was all out of whack with their terms of service so I did not want to continue. The architecture behind the website was also insanely stupid. If I'm ever invited to do a tech talk and some event I would like to do it on the insane architecture of this project.

But it worked very well and I used it a lot and other people did as well.

This post was supposed to be about all the projects I've done. That would take a while to write about and I just don't have the time right now. I might make it a video or something.

Fireball

Ah, I suppose I should mention that the first project I worked on to learn javascript was this. https://dnd.mcnally.je/ It's a DnD spell search thing that just loads all the spells in DnD from a static file and just loops though them for every character you type. Not the smartest idea and it starts to really grind on a mobile. Fun! The design is very cool though.


Published on Jan. 31, 2025, 4:47 p.m.

Author: Mark

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