I've been lazy in terms of working on projects outside of work for the past month or two. I have not written proper updates for MUTA in probably over four weeks and before the ongoing week 10, I also had not touched any other non-work related programming projects.

That's not to say I haven't been programming.  Since the beginning of 2018 I have written a backend server for a game-related project (in C with MariaDB), and I have partaken in a collaborative game engine project (in C++). I just haven't touched any projects I have proper personal investment in, that's all.

But that's about to change now. I'm looking forward to getting back to MUTA, for which I will likely begin writing entity scripting next. And this week, I've again been working on Jeesgen, the static website generator I wrote for the upkeep of this site.

New features

I knew a couple of features would be needed to make the site more functional, so I implemented them this week.

Individual post pages

It is now possible to generate individual pages for each post. This allows permalinking and easier linking to articles in general. It also helps RSS generation.

Whether or not individual pages will be generated for each post is controlled by a config option in the jees_config.cfg file ('generate individual post pages = true/false').

Unlisted pages

Pages in this context are individual areas of the website which all share the same template (for example, they all have the same menu for site navigation, but different content). Previously if a new page was added to a Jeesgen project, it would automatically be added to the default navigation menu. After the update, in the original post file it is possible to specify the option 'create menu entry = true/false' to ignore the creation of a navigation menu item.

This feature is handy when you want to create a page for something that doesn't need to be accessible from everywhere. For example, I may want to create a page for MUTA, but not have it appear up top there amongst the "News", "About" and "Projects" buttons.

Upcoming features

I didn't write Jeesgen to be used much by anyone but myself, although I want it to be applicable to a multitude of different types of websites. So some fairly important features are on the hold until I get a hold of myself:

   
• Proper date-time formatting,
   
• Characters outside of the standard ascii set,
   
• Install scripts for GNU/Linux and Windows,
   
• Distributable binary
   
• Daylight saving time

A feature I'm having problems with figuring out how to properly implement are RSS item descriptions. I like to include HTML in my posts so I in order to copy, say, the 256 first characters of a post to the description, I would have to make sure any open HTML tags are properly terminated so that they don't mess up the RSS XML. I don't see an easy way out of this, though one option could be to make the post format support Markdown, which would mean I would not have to use HTML to format posts.

Other stuff: music I've listened to recently

This isn't really related to programming or video games, but I like music, and especially I'm a big listener of electronic music. So in the name of spreading good music, below are a couple of interesting songs I've had the joy of listening to in the past few months.

Jonas Steur - Silent Waves (Youtube)

Trance

I don't know if the subgenre is Balearic or something else, but this one's a wonderfully calming track that I don't remember having heard of until recently, and neither have I paid much attention to the artist in question before.  While the calming melody feels ambient, it seems to keep on playing even after the song is over.

Anetha - Disinhibition (Youtube)

Techno

A fresh acid track that has an nicely driving bassline, giving the feeling of the beat crawling out of the listener's own head.

Spy 71 & Eva - Take Me ... Mr Love (Youtube)

Italo Disco

An italo classic and one of the songs of that era I constantly return.

Sixteen Souls - Late Night Jam (Youtube)

House

Some slightly funky, chilled house music from 1998 and nothing else.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Murder On The Dancefloor (Youtube)

Pop

Just pop music from the early 2000s. But with a disco/disco-house twist! And the music video is great.