In the second Vlog around building the new blog/LMS site I touch on two main topics:

1. Entity Relationships and how to easily work with them without needing an ORM.

2. Controlled Cells and HTMX and how they work together to build the comments section of the posts.

I'm curious - are you checking out HTMX yet? If so, what do you think? I'm really digging it so far and feel that I haven't tapped into anything close to its full power, yet, even though it seems like such a simple concept of a library.

I apologize for not getting the next vlog out - I've been completely absorbed working on the site itself. I'm at a good pausing point now, though, so I'll get the next vlog out in the next few days. Depends on how the snow currently coming down affects free time for the next couple of days.

I don't know that I'll be able to cover it all in a single vlog entry, but we'll see. IIRC, the following has happened since the first video:

• category system
• tags system
• wordpress importer
• Patreon logins integrated through Shield…

Shield was started over Christmas break last year, IIRC. I guess it is only fitting that I spent this break working on it some more. Well, I mostly tried to relax and enjoy family time (and too much time playing games). But I also managed to take a couple of nights and knock out one of the frequent questions we've gotten about Shield as developers like yourself start digging into it:

"What does this active field actually do?"

The unfortunate response was, "Not a whole lot".

That's about to be fixed, though. I just submitted a pull request that adds…

As promised, here's the first video in the new vlog where I go behind-the-scenes on how I'm building the new blog/LMS site. I go over things like:

• how it's organized

• how I think about a models role

• using HTMX for faster and smoother content loading and page switching.

• why I like TailwindCSS

• and more....

This first episode has been made public as a teaser/trailer to the series, but all future ones will be for patrons only.

Please let me know if you have any questions about anything I've discussed in this video and I'll…

I realized while working on the first course that the Wordpress site that I was using, while having tons of options available, was still a generally gross platform to work with lol, especially for the integrations like Patreon and GitHub that I want to do. So I'm doing what I should have done a long time ago and building the blog from scratch in CodeIgniter. And I want to take you along for the ride.

I just got started on it last night and the header image shows the current state. Once I get a little farther along I'll drop…

At my day job I've been using NextJS lately. In my spare time I've played with SvelteKit. One thing both of these have in common is file-system-based routing. If you've watched my GitHub repos over the last couple of years you'll know I played around with a file-system-based routing system once, though on a much simpler route. But why?

When working on Myth:work, it was an experiment to see if we could find some way simpler that would provide the tools we needed but remove as many of the barriers to building a site. And maybe even bring back some…

This is probably fairly obvious, but working in open source means that others review your code, even when you're the package author. Sometimes we all forget that in the moment, though.

I've been under a fair amount of stress lately, both at work and at home. On top of that I added the stress of my own open-source work, which I do most often because I enjoy it. Most of these are good stresses, but it still means that occasionally my fuse was a little shorter than I wanted it to be. This came to a head with some gut-reactions…

One thing that users of frameworks like CodeIgniter know is MVC architecture - Models, Views, and Controllers. Quite often the framework has setup an app structure that reflects this, and so tutorials and user guides leave the impression that we should organize our application that way. But is this always the best way?

I got to thinking about this recently while refactoring Bonfire. At one point, mainly due to frustrations with the refactoring progress, I started moving things to a little bit more traditional structure, pulling some files out of the Modules folders they were contained within and putting them…