Layout Overhaul and New Projects

Hi again!

Lots of exciting stuff has been in the works for the past few months, thanks in no small part to being quarantined at home and having loads more free time.

The first big announcement is that I've completely rewritten this blog! Along with a domain change, I decided to drop the few bulky dependencies it had (Bootstrap, jQuery, and the entire Font Awesome 5 set) in favor of writing custom HTML/CSS/JS. While being "fun" and saving my dear readers precious bandwidth, it's not something that I will do again in any project, current or future, as it's very tedious and time consuming. I've also open-sourced the code and added automated builds, which has been a great excuse to play around with Docker and The Cloud^TM. A few things that are missing but coming in the near future are email notifications for when I publish new content, unit and integration tests in Python, and categories for the posts.

The other big announcement is that I've decided to revive a former project of mine, Bike Math! Bike Math was a bicycle calculator and the first web app that I ever published many moons ago. I'm rebranding the project as Crank Tools and am greatly expanding the scope, with the intention of creating an all-in-one bike shop application capable managing scheduling, inventory and much more. On the technical side, I'm releasing it as a free Angular PWA and have been floating around the idea of creating a subscription model to include online support, remote backups, and email/SMS integration if the project gains enough traction. Please let me know if this is something that interests you because the project is still in its infancy and your input/feedback is invaluable.

As always, don't forget to subscribe and until next time!