Release Day

2021 is off to a productive start with 2 completed side projects in my portfolio.

First up is a new Janny Wurts - Official Forum that finally replaces the ancient Perl-based forum that ran from 1999 to 2021.

The new forum is based on Discourse and was pretty straightforward to configure. The most challenging part of this move was migrating 17,000 old posts into the new software. These posts weren't in a nice tidy database, but 1,400 separate HTML files which allowed the forum to work without an additional database hosting cost. The company behind the old software actually went out of business in 2012, so I had reverse engineer the data format and write a data pipeline that cleans the old posts and then imports them into the new forum.

The second project is a new Interactive Map of Paravia, the world from the Wars of Light and Shadows book series.

The old map was written with Dreamweaver and used a set of static pages with imagemaps to display the map. I used scripted calls to Imagemagick to slice up a high-resolution copy of the map into tiles and then used Leaflet.js to set it up with modern map controls.

What's next? My final side project before kid #2 comes along in May is a makeover for the website of Janny Wurts' husband, Hugo-award-winning artist, Don Maitz.