HELLO!

I'm Cosmic and I like connecting things together: old hardware + new software, networks and virtual things, ideas and aesthetics, etc.

This site is a hub where some things (and hopefully your interest) will connect together.

My web history

Years ago I had a couple small websites. I started off using Awardspace but decided to host my own using an old Pentium 3 laptop I had laying around. I had to learn about port forwarding, NAT, and then double-NAT since we had 2 routers for some reason.

My first stack was WAMP: Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Initially I made a super handy but minimal site where I could persist plaintext notes in a textbox, upload and download through a simple Apache-style file browser (with public/sharable links), and view webserver logs. I think I even had a proxy through it at some point for bypassing network filters. I used it kind of like a web flash drive and portal. I used no-ip as my DNS service and made a shell script to keep the name synced with our DSL IP.

Later, I had a blast writing a tiny CMS in PHP and letting some forum friends join and host stuff from my laptop. Another friend and I started a tech news website that lasted a week but was super fun. All the data was lost long ago though.

Later, I made some PHP chat apps to give my friends and I an alternative to SMS which was still kinda limited then. The final version was pretty robust for what it was, and I learned a lot about OWASP, database concepts, efficient syncing of messages, authentication, etc.

I hosted some public game servers on and off but haven't had an actual "site" in a long time.

TidySite

I was recently learning TypeScript so I decided to make a PoC static site generator using TypeScript and marked. It was pretty neat and I loved the simplicity. I kept adding onto it and adding more features and refactoring as my skills improved.

Eventually I named it "TidySite" because the output is designed to be strict ("tidy") HTML5 and displays correctly with or without CSS or JS. The goal was to emit a solid HTML skeleton that had some nice dynamic-like features that could then be themed with CSS. The only JS is for progressive enhancement - themes, theme storage, search, etc.

This site is TidySite's output. :)