Disclaimer: This is inaccurate to the current operation of the site. The post here only exists for historical accuracy.

Sup humans! It's ya girl. Here up in your bits with a totally new site. Okay well, not entirely new. Okay kinda new but the backend isn't. Fuck this is gonna need an explanation huh.

Problems

So if you didn't know yet, this specific domain (https://noirscape.dev/) has been empty for... quite some time now actually! Mostly just because I didn't know what to put on it; I mostly work on things in a modular sense, so if I put something on the root, I felt it wouldn't represent me as accurately. I always sorta knew that I wanted it to be a blog/news site of sorts related about things I enjoy/want to talk about, but there's nothing in the world that could get me to really enjoy using wordpress and I'm not too big on a lot of the static site generators out there. So for a while I'd been looking and at last, suprise I found something I enjoy.

xesite

So maybe you've seen christine.website. Maybe you haven't and just realized how similar those two sites look. Well, the truth of the matter is fairly simple: I decided to fork it because I think it looks amazing and I liked the idea of the backend being something in rust. Luckily for me, the backend is FOSS and under the zLib license. Because I'm feeling exceptionally nice not an arsebiscuit, the source of the fork will be public as well. However, in accordance with the license, no I didn't make the original, this is a fork and with several removed features.

I find the best way to learn new things is to experience them as I go along and often working in an existing codebase can help greatly improve your own skills since you get a lot of reference code.

Whilst I decided to take out a lot of features that are honestly complete overkill for my site (I have no use for prometheus which that site uses for visitation tracking for instance, I use shynet for cookieless visitor tracking instead. I CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY PEOPLE, I JUST WANT TO KNOW I'M NOT SHOUTING IN THE VOID!), the core stuff is there. I hope to tweak and adjust things as needed for the future. For me this is all very exciting, even if to you, the reader this is very boring and uninteresting.

New site

So yeah, here we are now. Please do hold tight, a lot of stuff is still under construction and we're still testing a bunch of things here and there but this should be fun!

How deployment works

Okay so this is mostly just interesting for me, since I need to document this process somewhere:

1. When locally writing a blogpost, just use deploy.bat (on Windows) or deploy.sh (on Linux) to get a quick local version of the site to test it.
2. You normally don't have to rebuild the application; that part is only needed when you change the templates in a heavy way. Don't do it if it's not needed, deploying takes a bit of time.
3. Once it's done, push the repo.
4. Then, pull the repo on the VPS.
5. Restart the systemd service.
6. ???
7. Profit.

If the templates were changed, make sure to generate a musl build! This avoids conflicts with GCC. Assuming cargo has musl installed, just use the following command: cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl and upload the resulting binary to the server before pulling and restarting the repo.