Welcome to znepb.me v7!

znepb.me v7 is, obviously, the 7th iteration of znepb.me. This version of znepb.me took the longest out of any to make. Development started back around August of 2022, but I stopped work on it in late August and picked it back up in February, when I started working on it periodically. Finally, here we are just in time for my birthday, and ready to release!

v6 and it's many problems

znepb.me v6's single-page design was okay, though it really prevented me from adding more features to the website or building onto the site, hence Lens' lack of navigation. Another issue I encountered with znepb.me v6 was it's strict, and frankly ugly, design. The projects section was never perfect, and I really wanted to fix that with version 6.9, which never came out.

A mockup of the intended design for the Projects section of znepb.me v6, circa about July or August.

The initial idea for improving on the projects section was to have a sort of projects "carousel", where the projects would come in and off screen, navigable via some buttons. This proved to have problems though, due to it's heavy JS reliance.

What's new?

Most notably, is the new design. Similarly to znepb.me v6, it was designed by my good friend AutiOne. I really wanted to focus on making just a nice, clean website to show off the stuff I made.

The goals
My biggest goal for znepb.me v7 was for it to be customizable (e.g., being able to change projects, add blog posts, etc) without me having to make Git commits, as well as having a nice design. While outlining the website, I also really did not want it to be just a single page like v6 was, which proved to be a very bad idea.

JavaScript
The web today is all about JavaScript. znepb.me v7 uses a lot of it, though I tried my best to cater to those who prefer not to use it. Some features aren't perfect, but it's really the best I could do with the limitations. I wanted to do what Apple did with their navigation, a checkbox that opens up a navigation screen, but I couldn't figure it out. The solution was to have an entire page dedicated to navigation. If a user chooses to have JS disabled on a device with a smaller screen, the menu is just a separate page. Simple as that, nothing else I could do.

Microservices galore
znepb.me v7 uses 3 microservices - the API, my "CDN", and an analytics server. They each use a private web framework AutiOne made, it's quite powerful and gets the job done.

Privacy
The analytics are meant to be very minimal, it just collects a user's country of origin, the page they visited, and the device and OS they are using. I love being able to see if my website is being used, I doubt it is, but it's cool to see. This information will soon be public on my Grafana page.

Final product
Well here you are on the final product. Hopefully it isn't too buggy, and hopefully it's also easy to navigate.

What's next?

My next intentions going forward are to remake Countdowns (again), redo Lens, and make a coasters site, which I will use to track all of the coasters I've ridden. Since you're here, I'll give you a sneak peek of Lens v3:

Conclusion

znepb.me v7 was a lot of trial and error. Many features were intended but never came to fruition. Most notably, the snow on the home page is now gone, but that's about it really. This new design, I hope, will make znepb.me more expandable in the future and allow me to improve on it forever. This really is meant to be the "final" version of znepb.me, at least for some time. Thank you for reading, and have a great day. 👍