Migrating to Hugo and GitHub Pages

I wanted to have greater control over my blog, so I’ve been thinking about moving it to a self-hosted WordPress installation. In the end, I decided to migrate from WordPress to a static blog generated with Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages. This post will be the last one posted on reusingthewheel.wordpress.com – the future ones will be posted on piotr-rusin.github.io.

Designing a plugin system for base16-theme-switcher

I’ve been working on a plugin system for my theme switcher project, and I think now it’s the time to introduce it here and describe my rationale behind its design.

A new project: base16-theme-switcher

Configurability and availability of multiple desktop environments and window managers are some of the things I like about using Linux-based operating systems. In recent months I gradually migrated from using full-fledged desktop environments like Cinnamon and Xfce to using i3wm in combination with urxvt, dunst and other applications commonly used with light window managers. While experimenting with their configuration, I discovered base16 and its derivative: base16-xresources – projects providing color schemes for syntax highlighting and application theming, each based on 16 colors.

The first working version of Yule

I recently made some progress on Yule – my Spring Boot-based blog engine project – and now I have its first working version. The current features, installation, configuration and how to run the engine are all described in the README file in the repository of the project, so I won’t be covering them here.

My next steps in developing the engine will include:

• improving the front end
• refactoring the code by restructuring the configuration and moving repetitive code from controllers into common dependencies (including moving some data-manipulation code to some new service-layer classes).
• adding more features, like configurable menus and tag system

This is just a short informational post. It’s been quite a long time since I posted anything here and I wanted to post some information about my progress. Plus, I’d prefer describing my code, its organization and problems I solved by writing it a certain way once it is at least refactored.

Also, I’m considering switching to writing more short posts like this and doing it more frequently, instead of posting infrequent, but long articles. I think such shorter, but more single-topic-focused posts might be more interesting to read, plus they might be better for my motivation to write this blog.

Implementing service layer for Yule

Since my introductory post on Yule, I’ve been doing some work on the project. I’ve implemented an automatic article publication feature as a part of service layer and I added some methods used by it to the repository layer of my project.

This post covers these changes and some problems I encountered during testing.

A new blog engine project

In one of my previous posts I described a blog engine I was developing. At the time, I had returned to it after a hiatus and I was convinced I would continue working on it. However, at the same time I was still more interested in developing my python-based url-shortener project and I also already planned moving on to other projects and technologies. As a result, I got bored of blog-engine again.

Since then, I’ve been focusing on Java and Spring Framework. This resulted in a new project: another blog engine, but this time based on Spring and designed with different features.

Url-shortener: a demo and more refactoring

A demo instance of my url-shortener project is now available here:

https://url-shortener.reusingthewheel.tk

Usually, URL shorteners are deployed under a short domain name (for example: goo.gl, bit.ly). It’s not the case here, but since it’s just a demo I didn’t think looking for a short domain for it was necessary, so I chose a longer domain that is also related to my blog.

I have also made some changes to the application. Some of them were minor, like adjusting font sizes in the front end, renaming some local variables in the back end, etc., but there are also some bigger changes.

A PHP/Symfony blog engine

A few months ago I started a blog engine project based on Symfony framework. I’ve been adding things and making changes to it from time to time. Since August, I took a longer break in its development because I wanted to focus on other things, but now I’m returning to the project.

Changes in url-shortener

When I introduced my URL shortener project, I already had a working version and I thought I only needed to improve its front-end to be able to release the first stable version of the application. I also had some ideas for new features to be added to it.

However, the longer I looked at my code, the more room for improvements I saw. Although I ended up adding some new features, most of the changes I made since then were refactorizations, changes in design and architecture of the application and code style improvements.

In this post, I’m going to describe some of them.

The first stable release of spam-lists

I released the first stable version of spam-lists. It can be downloaded from github or PyPI.

In comparison to the version described in this post, the stable version contains some changes, mostly spelling error corrections and reformatting of docstrings. I have also changed the license of the project from Apache License 2.0 to MIT.