Programming Projects, where are they?

 

I think it must be a common situation for any person who creates things that you start a whole lot more projects than you actually complete. I've been messing around with programming projects for a significant fraction of my life and have lost count of the number that have reached a certain amount of progress and just... stop.

Even among the projects that enjoy good progress and reach a point where I want to share them there can be issues in terms of what form to share them in. There can be quite a lot of work involved in uploading and presenting projects online. Often the impulse can be it throw them up on the likes of itch.io and be done with them.

I, uh, should probably have mentioned sometime in the last couple of years that I have an itch.io page with projects on it... https://alexmulkerrin.itch.io/

So many fine projects that have never gotten a dedicated blog post are there.

Having been posting about programming projects online for about a decade now the form of how I've uploaded them to be shared has changed over time:

•  Initially I would just put the JavaScript inline on the page to be rendered into an html element which was neat but it did run into issues when more than one projects code was on the page at once and there were variable name collisions. 

• I could alleviate that somewhat by making it so only the intro to a post appeared on the blog homepage and you had to click through to see the running program. The issue then became when I wanted to write bigger projects and the code became too big to have all in one html file.

• I could split my code into dedicated script files if I had someplace to host them. Initially there was such a hosting functionality built into Google Drive that let you not only host files publicly but also embed JavaScript projects directly in another webpage.

• Alas this was only provided for a short time, then discontinued leaving mysterious Google error messages on the pages that used it, such as my initial post here about Swarmlord. Looking for an alternative I came across rawgit that let you host projects from a repository on Github. I already had a GitHub account so it was an excuse to be a more dilligent developer and use git as part of my development process.

• Sadly last time I checked a rawgit link it wasn't working either. At that point itch.io had become a thing so I eventually moved to hosting projects on that including old and recent Ludum Dare entries, another thing I have been neglecting to blog about!

Long story short, from now only any programming projects I share will be hosted on my itch.io page where, hopefully, they will remain accessible and continue to work.

I would also like to get back into the habit of posting on here about projects I am currently working on. Even going so far as to provide links to in development projects not 'officially' visible on itch.io. For example this:

It's a world map generator which lets you zoom in super close just like Google Maps :D

Super secret link here

There's a whole lot of work to do on this but the essential algorithm to allow you to zoom in and out focused on the mouse cursor's position is solid. For now I simply adapted the Civilization terrain generation algorithm and tile types. It's crazy to think that on a properly scaled planet each tile is 500km across :o