Added the ability to have directory listings and moved to rst

+ Added projects/website.rst to describe the site + Updated templates + Added more comments
2020-02-21 21:54:17 -06:00
parent 5e161f9b35
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+This Website
+============
+This is the 2nd version of my personal website, the first version was very similar to this but written in plain HTML
+using Bootstrap. I was never very happy with how it looked and it being raw HTML limited what I could do with it. To
+improve it, I set out with a few goals:
+
+* Use a web framework to improve capabilities
+* Be easy to deploy
+* Allow things, like the resume, to be easily editable
+* Improve aesthetics
+* Ensure mobile version also looks good
+
+Picking Rust and Rocket
+-----------------------
+As I am not much of a UI person, the website update was put on the back burner for sometime. The old site was "good 
+enough." I originally considered doing it in Python and using Django. But that fails the criteria of being easily
+deployable. In early 2020, I began learning Rust out of curiosity and the need to use it for research. 
+I decided to tackle the website backend in Rust as a learning exercise. I then went with the Rocket framework. It 
+seemed to suit my needs and supported Tera templates. Tera templates are very similar to Django's templates that I
+had already had experience in.
+
+Easily Editable
+---------------
+As the style of the site is a simplistic linux terminal, I decided it would be nice to have the longer pages be in
+raw reStructuredText. This fits the aesthetic of the site well and unlike HTML files, they are raw text and are easy to
+write and read while editing them. RST files can also easily be built into PDFs, which is great for generating a resume.
+
+To create new pages, I simply have to add new .rst files to a directory on the website. When the templates are rendered,
+the Rust backend looks for all pages and lists them. To control ordering, I implemented a ranking system where the first
+character of a file name is its rank. For example, my resume is in a file called 1resume.rst. This gives it rank of
+1 so it shows up on the main page before other links.
+
+Improving Aesthetics
+--------------------
+Like stated early, I am no UI designer. The terminal style meant I could put very little effort into the design of the
+actual website. Somehow on version one, I still managed to mess that up. This was mainly due to hacking together 
+bootstrap to give me something that looked like a terminal. This time, I dumped Bootstrap and wrote my own CSS.  I should
+have done that the first place as it was easy to do and produced a far better result. This also by side effect improved
+on the site looked on mobile.
+
+Future Improvements
+-------------------
+As I continue to learn Rust, I plan to implement more features of RST into the raw file displays. For example, doing
+links. I want to strike a balance between the aesthetic of a terminal and usefulness. Being able to embedded images
+would be nice.