The Technical Update

Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 10:00am

With my degree coursework behind me, I’ve checked another box off my post-degree bucket list: the core technical updates and bugfixes for this website.

The technology running this website’s backend is a server framework called Actix, written in a language called Rust. Rust has a robust software package distributions systems called Crates. Well, this website’s crates had grown quite out of date. And even getting myself situated to make changes was an endeavor! My current desktop computer is one I bought in 2022 with game development in mind. I never bothered to set up a development environment for this website on it. One of the biggest upgrades I made there was creating a Docker container for running a local copy of this website’s database. That will save a ton of time the next time I have to set this environment up somewhere.

Another thing that had happened during my long interval away from writing and publishing was a deprecation in the backing service that deploys my website application to a publicly accessible location. That deployment software itself is versioned, and the version I was on had fallen out of service.

So, after setting up and upgrading my development environment and upgrading the deployment software, I was ready to get to work on the website itself.

The first task on the docket was upgrading all those crates I mentioned. This was more of a challenge than you might imagine. The subset of the Actix server framework governing sessions and login had received massive interface changes, which required me to completely rework the parts of the website that log me in and out of the admin tool I use to write blog posts and manage the website’s content. The upside is that all of those changes were beneficial. I like how the code reads much better now, and it’s far simpler, too.

So far, the changes have been to the technology itself and don’t really affect the experience of a user of the website. With the core technology issues out the way, I was able go after the issues that had been bugging me about this website for a long time.

The first thing I did was make changes to the website’s layout system that will make things display somewhat better on mobile devices. The CSS framework that governs these things is—shocker—wildly out-of-date. I have a plan to rip it out and replace it with something else entirely, but I restrained myself from doing so now. More on that in a bit. So, I was stuck doing the best I could with a sub-optimal framework. A full fix here will have to wait for my next major website revision.

I also fixed a longstanding bug on the bibliography page that had been bugging me. Secondary novellas of unpublished works had been showing incorrectly for years. Specifically, the five novellas comprising The Five Kingdoms of Daniel Worthy were showing up, even though Five Kingdoms itself is suppressed. Today, you’ll find that they no longer appear.

Finally, on my about page, I changed my profile photo from black and white to color and I updated the copy as well.

Bigger things are coming in this space, though. This weekend, I got myself re-set up and fixed those things that desperately needed fixing, but a full visual revamp has been needed for some time. That is in the works, but will have to wait until after all my new book covers are complete.