I've been learning Go and HTMX as of late, so that I can create more fun things in the future. As part of learning Go for building my new web project, I've been learning HTMX to replace the standard jQuery/Javascript stuff I had been using. As part of that process, I plan to swap the jQuery/AJAX on this site with HTMX (where applicable), as I think that would be a fun project.

I recently fixed a bug on the blog where the entire excerpt was not showing on the blog index, but was showing correctly here on the website home page. It came down to some weird quirk with how Ghost handles {{excerpt}} in theme templates, but switching it to {{custom_excerpt}} resolved the problem. It was a tad annoying.

Even though the React overhaul ended up delayed / scrapped, I have been working on implementing new features into the site. I've added password reset functionality alongside a basic profile page where I can change my name, email and password.

While the site has no public sign up or reason for that to exist, I felt it was nice to add the features I did as practice on those things for the future projects I would like to work on for experience and resume building (e.g. the MERN stack simple forum I want to create as an experiment). I have no timeline on any of those projects yet, but they will be publicly available once they are in states there I am comfortable doing so. I may even throw these projects up on the demos domain if I get that far, or just have the source code available for people to run them themselves.

I've decided to put off the overhaul I announced in the previous entry. I am actually quite happy with the state of the site and would prefer to just keep working on what I've built here instead of reworking everything to make it work with React.

Instead, I am starting work on some React projects that I will have over on GitHub as I get progressing on them. My two initial projects are a simple Blog platform and a Twitch bot utilizing the front end to send commands and things over to the Twitch channel that I can use for giveaways and things as needed / wanted. I could potentially then host this front end for friends and things of that nature.

In the coming weeks I plan to overhaul the entire site and drop support for handlebars templates and move everything over to React and TypeScript. This has been something I have been learning recently and is something I have wanted to do for quite some time, so now seems as good a time as ever to start working on that. These changes will be tracked on the GitHub repo located here. These changes are something I teased a few years back when I intended to use the MEAN stack, but with this change the site will be on the MERN stack (Mongo, Express, React, NodeJS).

I'll have a more in depth write up about why I decided to make this change over on the blog as I begin implementing the changes required to make this happen.