domdicarlo/dom_website

I am working on creating my own personal website to act as a portfolio, space for my blog, and finally a text based adventure game in the works.

Dominic DiCarlo's Website 2020

About

I am working on a django based website, with my blog, resume, and general info about me for employers and the curious.

The website at branch master is currently hosted at domdicarlo.com, or dominicdicarlo.azurewebsites.com

Because I am on a free tier, the site is not always on. It takes around 15 seconds to load, but after that refershing is quite quick.

Progress

October-November 2019 - Inception

I wanted to work on web development skills, so I started this website as a small project. I had a really busy school schedule at this time, so I didn't get to work on this much at all. After doing some research and deciding my goals, I went with a Django backend. I wanted to work with Python since I was going to make this my go-to coding interview language. I also read Django is a good framework to learn to nail down good organization habits for a project. I bought a cheap course on Udemy for Full stack Django web dev, but honestly you can just use free resources that are just as good/better. The django tutorial for a polls app found here is very insightful and got me running pretty quickly.

Since I am more of a CSS tinkerer then designer and creator, I went with a template found here: https://colorlib.com/wp/template/jackson/. I would like to make my own from-scratch design at some point, but I wanted to get something up asap that still looks nice. I made the homepage its own django app, since I liked the organization this allowed me to do (I could keep homepage static files all in one place), and I didn't know what other app package I would include it in. I will make my blog its own app, with making eventual 'apps' for my game and portfolio.

December 2019

I got the first real thing on my webpage going - my blog. I started a blog in Summer 2018 since I had some philosophical ideas I was itching to put down on paper and really articulate properly. I managed to do so, but I didn't manage to sustain the blog going forward. It would be nice to continue it some time, as I still do have ideas. Life has just been a bit busy as of late, as I try to keep up with UChicago and find my way through life moving forward. Perhaps once things settle down some more I can get to writing again.

To get my blog online, I did some free style django-python coding. I created a model called Blog in my models.py file in the Blog app. This was a simple model with just a few fields for title, publication date, text body, and a slug field for creating a post's url. I also added a category field that I may use later to organize blog posts, as well as eventually changed text body to a markup text field using django-markupfield. By doing this, I can write my blog posts in markdown and render the markdown directly in a django template. This provides a simple and easy way to create basic and pretty blog posts.

I write the blog posts in markdown, and then simply copy and paste my work into a new post by using the Django admin site to add a new blog post to my blog post model. Posts are stored in a MySQL database, and I am using a free remote one at remotemysql.com .

My blog consists of two possible views, the index - where I simply list all posts and their links and dates, and view_post - where a template is used to load the blog post into a pretty page. Both of these were quite simple to code in Django. The index view simply gets the top 5 latest posts from the blog model, and then uses this to render the index page and populate it with post names. The post view uses the slug to build a url (which is what a slug is in web-dev). It then populates the blog template with the blog data. Overall, these work simply but it was nice to get acquainted with Django in this way.

March-April 2020

Wow, alright, time for another update. After a very intense quarter of CS in Winter 2020, I got to return to working on the website during spring break. At last, I was able to start working on my text adventure game.

The game is taking inspiration from old school text adventure games, ala Zork. More specifically, I want my game to parse text similarly to this style of game. Now adays, there are fancier text parsing systems then the one offered by Zork and other INFOCOM games (the company behind Zork). However, I think the one in Zork is clever enough to provide the user with good engagement, while not being too complicated such that the user needs to worry about "gaming" the input too much.

I started off my game with a simple base that I saw in a youtube video tutorial on building a text-based adventure game. I found a terminal emulator based on JQuery in an effort to give the same feel a player might have had when they booted up Zork on a Commodore 64. The bare-bones base game I started (that can be found at domdicarlo.com/text_game) allows for simple exploration of a dimly lit room using "go" followed by a cardinal direction. There is no way to interact with anything yet, although this is coming soon once I can properly parse text.

To get this parser in Zork, I decided I would try to dig through the old Zork source code, since it is publically available here. This may have not been the best decision, since this code has been awfully difficult to read. The language is ZIL, which stands for Zork Implementation Language, which itself is based on MDL (Muddle, or MIT Design Language), which itself is based on Lisp. The language isn't the best to look at, and trying to decipher its syntax led me to be very thankful for the modern day C syntax many popular languages are based on today. But what really made the problem worse was the lack of comments and use of white space and indentations. While there may have been a method to the madness there that I wasn't in on, it was mostly just madness for me.

I have added a ton of comments to the code in my attempt to understand it, which can be found here. The next step is to just start writing some code in JS and seeing where I can get with what I have scraped so far from the original parser code. I have now alotted an hour each day to work on this project; we will see how well this works for making progress and if during the academic quarter I can stick to this. Excited to be working on this.