With the playtest for my game out there and in the hands of a small group of people, I've been working on a side project to fill the time while I wait for feedback. I'm still doing a little bit of work on the game, identifying a few bugs and making a bit of a smoother experience based on immediate feedback, but overall I am waiting to hear back from more people so I can compile a full feedback list.

The side project is a pretty simple website, but I think it will be a fun experiment. I've been really enjoying Keybase recently, for its personal identification, shared filesystem and chat. One of its cooler features, to me, is that you can have your public shared folder in Keybase, which is signed by your key, served through a shell website called keybase.pub, which will render markdown files automatically, and acts as a dumb web server.

My page there as an example:

twisterghost.keybase.pub

I am drawing inspiration from this to make a tiny platform where you can claim an "identity" (effectively, an account, more on that soon), and create posts just written in markdown, which become available at a short url, similar to the way keybase.pub works. The goal is to allow for a frictionless place to plop posts, which isn't quite as demanding as a blog, and isn't quite as in-depth as Medium. Something simple and quick. Let me just post some thoughts and have it out there.

There won't be much in the way of logging in. You'll identify yourself with your name and passphrase at time of writing, but otherwise, not much in the way of account management. You'll be able to write a bit of a bio by writing a topic about yourself, and visiting the root page at your subdomain will list your bio and all things you have written about.

I might take it a step further and allow posts-as-replies, which I think would be a fun way to add a little bit of depth to the service without making it complicated or spread out too thin. Writing, and posting. That's it. No bullshit.

I'm building this service with TypeScript, which I have been toying with for a few months. I adore JavaScript, but the TypeScript compiler wows me to no end. It has zero dependencies, can compile to any ECMAScript version, and supports compiling JSX out of the box. The JSX part is useful, because I'm going to be using Preact for the frontend, which is a tiny, 3kb implementation of the core API of React. It is good for building dynamic frontends which span multiple pages, rather than one big webapp like React prefers.

I am also using a new-to-me database which I've had my eye on for a while, LevelDB. It is a simple key-value store, with not many bells and whistles, but boy is it fast. I will probably be writing a small abstraction layer on it, which I may open source. LevelDB is the foundation for a lot of other database projects, just because it is so simple and quick, and it's JS api can have the backend swapped out for other connectors, which is pretty sick.

Overall excited to work with these techs, and hopefully I can product something nice. My free time is dwindling, though, and most of it is spent relaxing in the evening, or working on the game. Hoping I can find time to finish this project.

That's all for now.

~tg

realizing this is about the closest I could get to twisternet 2 without raising alarm bells with legal at my job