Hello, I'm Russ, and this is my website. I'm a software engineer who programs for the love of the craft in an age of tech disillusionment. The purpose of this site is to give me a place to publish my thoughts in general and on programming, personal projects, and professional developments.

Blog Model Done

Publish Date: 2026-08-15

As promised, I'm back today on August 15, and the blog model has been implemented. The design ended up being quite simple:

Useful Idea #1 - Markdown Represents Article Content

I considered having a tables for images and components, but decided the simplest option was to represent the articles as markdown. Markdown has two nice properties:

• flexible enough to represent much article content. ex: paragraphs, images, tables, quotes, lists, etc.
• constrained enough to disallow esoteric content. ex: per-markdown document arbitrary styling, javascript, forms, etc.

Useful Idea #2 - One Model, Different Views

The article model is referenced in three places:

1. Article Listing on the Index Page. This will probably be more interesting later as more articles are published in the future
2. Individual Articles. These landings display a single article
3. RSS Feed. Previously, it was hand-written, but now it's generated from the database model

Future Enhancements

The goals of this site are to be a whiteboard for my programming projects and to itself be a place to showcase my work. I'm always looking for more things to implement!

Here are some additional improvements for the future:

1. Image API - Currently the images are part of the application build, which isn't great IMO. It would be better if they were in the database and could be referenced via an API. It would also be good to have better control over image sizes
2. Publish API - It would be great if articles and images could be published to the site via a command line tool
3. Toy Game - I love making games, but I've not made a web-based game in a long time. I'm conisdering making a little toy game on this site
4. Visual Modes - It would be great if the site had a 90's mode, terminal mode, Web 2.0 mode, and modern mode

OK, I'm going to think real hard about what to do next. See you next month.