Captain's Log: Stardate 78069.7

Today I got a huge amount of work done on the website's blog engine, including importing all the old devlog entries from Discord into the website's DB. The blog engine supports tagging, so I wrote a bunch of regexes to add tags to the imported posts, and it worked pretty decently. It should be interesting to explore things like the "bug" tag, for example.

The engine is pretty usable. The editor has a live markdown preview, and the blog display page does an infinite scroll (which does not seem to work for boggy, which is a major problem as he's probably my most dedicated reader!). There are filter pages for tags, and then individual post pages with next/previous navigation.

I also went ahead and generated dynamic RSS feed and sitemap XML pages, and I've wired up a discord bot hoping that it can pipe in updates from the website automatically, though I am concerned that formatting will suck. This post will be the first test of the new RSS -> discord system.

Now the website is getting REALLY close to where I can release the full thing, as a first draft. There's still a lot to do, but the core features work "well enough" that it's worth getting it out there and letting search engines start to index it. Really all that I need to do before pushing to prod is changing the signup/login page to display a confirmation gate that says something like "Only people on the pre-alpha list will be able to sign up. Don't bother trying if you're not on the list. [Proceed]".

But alas, that will wait until next week. Tomorrow morning I'm driving to southern Arizona to finally pick up my custom-built Iris Infinity XL paramotor (see below for a photo of my specific unit). I'm going to assemble and adjust it with my instructor and weather permitting, I will do the last few flights to get my PPG2 rating, which means I'll be ready to take it home and fly solo. There are no words for how excited I am to finally get this thing!