Current Projects Status

This year was my most productive year by far. I have been working on multiple projects at once and recently have concluded that I must change my project priorities. If you've been reading my SWR posts, you would know that my main priority is completing EggSiege, the next, unique & fun Minecraft server. This project has been taking up all of my free time, and I have realized that my website infrastructure problems have become urgent and I must fix them soon. There are many bugs and the backend has become bloated. My AmazinAxel.com site is extremely unfinished and bare, and the contact form still doesn't work. The CSS needs to be restyled to something more efficient and clean and needs to have better accessibility support. I don't have a proper CMS yet for managing content, which is very important for site access on other devices (I'm using VSCode currently for post creation). As you can see, I have a lot of website infrastructure that needs to be worked on, so I must take a pause with EggSiege. I have yet to announce when EggSiege will be released, however the release date is now expected to be in December alongside the release of Xenon, the free Minecraft hosting platform. Stay updated through my SWR posts for more information about this major priority change.

Nov 24th, 2023

New project release!

I've just released a new project called GitCMS! It's a great way to manage your sites by giving you an amazing Markdown editor (SimpleMDE) and an intuitive UI. It's now open source on GitHub, and the website is now live. I've created my own authentication script to work with Cloudflare Functions (Workers) and it works great. In fact, I'm writing this post right now using GitCMS! It has an over-animated UI, so its great for people who love eye-candy. It's also very fast and light on bandwidth, and doesn't use any back-end dependencies. It's also fully static (except for the authentication script) so it doesn't rely on NPM or any packages. It uses the GitHub API & an OAuth app to connect to your GitHub account and features a lightweight code editor (Codeflask) / viewer and defaults to a nice text editor on unsupported files. It also allows you to view media, such as videos, images, and audio, without ever leaving the comfort of the file browser! This project is licensed under GPL v3, so you can use it for pretty much any purpose.

Here's what GitCMS looks like in its first release:

Jun 17th, 2023

Major new website updates

Over the next few weeks, you will see a lot of changes. First off, I've made my migration away from Hostinger and all is going very well. Secondly, I have started a migration of data from AmazinAxel.com to AlecsHome.com. I will no longer include SWR posts or announcements from AmazinAxel.com on AlecsHome.com, and they will only be available here on AlecsHome. AmazinAxel will become a landing site with a nice design and all blog content there will be removed. I have also made my website open source on GitHub, for anyone to inspect! The landing site will become open source on GitHub as well, however it is still private as it's still in development. I also expect some development slowdowns on my project because we will be taking a trip this next weekend & will be taking a trip to Seattle during Independence Day. The Lofi player site has also changed to lofi.amazinaxel.com from amazinaxel.com/lofi. I am revamping my entire online presence, my content style will change to a more professional format, my GitHub profile will become more important, and I'm adopting a new design style. It's going to take a while to completely finish this migration, but it'll be great once it's finished. I'll make sure to keep you all up-to-date here on the continuing updates!

Jun 10th, 2023

New website, new backend, new everything!

Well, as I promised from this weeks' SWR post, I've made a new website! Yes, what you're seeing here is my new website, and it looks great! Everything is nice, modern, clean, and faster than ever. I've started my transition away from unsustainable platforms, and I'm making my way into the future! Cloudflare Pages now hosts this site for completely free (unlike before, Hostinger was more restrictive and costed us a lot of money) and provides unlimited bandwidth & usage. This is all thanks to my website becoming 100% static (except for the Workers part, which I'll get to in a bit) because of my own, custom-built static site generator! That's right, I made my own static site generator just for this site, and it works great. I found that other blogging platforms were too bloated, and I felt like learning a new language, so I spent the last 2 weeks building this site.

How did I create it? I used Node.js for the backend build tool, Marked for rendering Markdown into HTML, Nunjucks as the templating engine (subject to change), Day.js for the time / date formatting, and Cloudflare Pages for hosting this site! I setup Wrangler to help develop the site, and learned about how to use NPM and the Cloudflare ecosystem. I really like the ecosystem, everything works great and things are super fast! I also had to figure out a way to get the contact form working, so I used Pages Functions (which are just Workers made for Pages) and integrated it with Workers KV (my preferred storage platform) to create the contact form, whilst keeping the entire site affordable to maintain (now I'm just paying for the 2 domains, not the hosting!) and easy to update. Just a quick note, I may consider making this open source, but for now, I'm keeping it closed source for security purposes.

Jun 2nd, 2023

Lofi Player's First Stable Release!

Today, Lofi Player has permanently exited public beta and has entered into a stable version! Throughout the past 2 weeks, I have been hard at work making many, many development sprints and iterations on this program, and it's safe to release it into a stable version. I feel very accomplished and I'm ready to move on, so you won't notice many more updates to it. There are just too many new features that have been added in the past couple weeks, so you'll need to go see the Changelog, located in the navigation panel. I still plan on adding more tracks to the radios, so it's important that you still keep clicking that 'Update' button whenever new tracks are added. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this application with your friends to help it grow, and I really hope that you all enjoy this gift to the world!

May 17th, 2023