let it leave me like a long breath

oh right two week projects; i'm still kind of doing those after nanowrimo

on like the first and second i was like, okay sure, do a little rendering stuff, get some better shape rendering stuff, maybe world generation stuff like cacti, etc.

thennnn tumblr announced its porn ban

and like i haven't really been using tumblr for a while now, so that doesn't really directly affect me (aside from obliterating all the porn artists i was following) but it got me thinking about actually permanently moving my content somewhere, and centralizing it instead of having a bunch of different sites that all get a different sliver of my work. i was like, hmm, but making an entire CMS/blog/art site framework is actually a big challenge? but then i remembered that i had already done it years and years ago.

so i used to write php and way back in the day (for nanowrimo 2009, actually) i wrote a little database-backed web thing where you posted stuff into a text field and it stored the text and the wordcount and generated graphs for words written in that day and average words written per day and all sorts of stuff. and then it ended up as kind of a fic WIP repository. and eventually (2013 and 2014) i was like "php is pretty terrible and i should rewrite it in something else", and dug up happstack and got parts of it working in haskell.

and so over the past two weeks i've been working on that and getting it into shape. mostly just getting it to compile, because i updated it to no longer be running on libraries from 2013, but then also i added in rss feeds for tags and individual posts, and hacked in some more complex tag structures (previously it was set up with danbooru-style tag implications, and i hacked that up to work more like file directories) and i looked at what would need to happen for it to support ActivityPub (the thing that makes mastodon / pleroma federate), and it turns out that's not super complex so i might add that in too.

it all runs, so i could theoretically dump it onto the tzaphiriron.sidemoon server and give a live demo, but 1. there're a lot of old fic wips that i don't actually want to release and 2. doing that would require upgrading the hell game webserver also, since the qliphoth site runs with a modern haskell platform, but the hell game site is built with a considerably more out-of-date one, and upgrading that would mean dumping the old half-finished hell game update out there.

we'll, uh, see how much work i want to put into hell game right this second in order to make qliphoth run.

also since i have no clue how to manage auth stuff, the qliphoth setup is currently nearly entirely unsecured. or rather, the auth setup is just a check to see if the ip is 127.0.0.1, and if so it generates pages with permissions, and if not it doesn't. i'd like to get that at least a little more functioning before i host the server and release the code.

(one of the things i realized was that if i do activitypub federation i'm going to need actual permissions controls even if it's only ever set up as a single-user server, since ofc once people subscribe to feeds there's the question of what view permissions they'd have. so just making a server to only host one person's files with no social aspect doesn't actually reign in the permissions/social complexity much once you start to support any kind of activity stream.)






i am not going to lie i mostly added screenshots because i wanted to test out dreamwidth's image-uploading setup. yeah it's definitely the kind of thing that was designed in the early 2000s.