Website URL: https://alpha01.github.io/reconquista-timeline/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/alpha01/reconquista-timeline
I’m somewhat of a Hispanic history nerd, particularly the Reconquista Era. I’ve read about 20+ books on this subject, have three regular journal notebooks scattered with lots of different notes. I love book journaling, however this form of research and study does have it’s drawbacks. The main one, my notes are not easily “searchable” and more importantly if I lose my journal notebooks, I lose my notes! While I’m still going to continue to use my book journal, I’ve started to migrate my notes to a digital format as well.
As I continue to port my notes to word documents. I wanted to also create a simple easy to follow timeline. While theirs some Reconquista timelimes out there, I wanted to create one from scratch. Solely based on my notes and research. I immediately recalled a cool timeline web-based app called “Life”. I’ve used this app a few years ago, and was a big fan of its simplicity. Although the project hasn’t been updated in years, it’s not using any web frameworks. So decided to use this application for my Reconquista timeline. As stated, the app doesn’t use any web framework, so simple changes can be done using plain vanilla JavaScript and CSS.
Simple, well sort off. I’m not a Web Developer, nor would I claim to be one. Thus said, I’ve done plenty of back-end web development in my previous jobs, so depending on the stack, I feel confident tackling complex problems.
While in the past, I’ve considered switching careers from a Linux Systems Adminstrator / DevOps / SRE Engieer role towards a more developer only focused role rather than a hybrid. The primary reason why I didn’t pursued this career change has because of how incredible complex (and ugly) are front-end technologies. Just working with JavaScript alone adds fuel to my disdain towards disdain towards front-end development (I’m not going to mention NodeJS and npm!). For just about any front-end related work that I do, I always find myself “Googling” my way through a problem!
Since the application is fully static, this gave me the perfect opportunity to try out GitHub Pages for the first time. I must say, GitHub Pages is awesome. The setup is dead simple, simply select the branch in the configuration settings, and GitHub automatically adds the corresponding event Action to build and publish site. Funny enough, GitHub Pages uses Varnish which is what I also use on my webapps for HTTP accelerator/caching proxy features. Making changes are instantly, I haven’t noticed any stale caches. GitHub Pages is an awesome service, and it’s free! (only for public repos)