site on MXI

Still alive

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:45:00 +0400

Wow, it’s been 5 years since the last post.

I’ve got somewhat unusual topic to cover and I don’t have another place to put it, so I thought I’d try to reanimate this blog. That will be another post. Here is a bit of rambling about the blog revival.

JavaScript spoiler with a twist (collapsing up or down)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:28:11 +0300

I thought that I will eventually need to use spoilers in this blog to hide long and optional blocks of text. And at the same time I’m often unhappy with collapsible block implementations across the Internet.

So I decided to design my own spoiler with one useful feature: it can be collapsed not only from the top edge but also from the bottom edge — you will not lose the line you were reading and you don’t have to scroll all the way to the beginning of the spoiler.

Examples:

click to show

This spoiler can be expanded up and down. And your mouse is left right over the button you just pressed whenever it is possible (on top and bottom of a page there may be not enough stuff to keep it so, obviously).

click to show

This spoiler can be expanded in one direction only. Collapsing behavior is still the same. The difference is just a few lines in CSS.

click to show

Keep reading to see how it is done.

Parallel processing in PowerShell

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 21:05:05 +0300

Running arbitrary number of tasks in parallel with PowerShell, while showing overall progress.

The main disadvantage of the code I provided in previous post is that it is performed sequentially. We can speed it up by means of parallel processing, since main limiting factor is not an I/O but minifying algorithms performance.

There are a lot of ways to use parallelism in PowerShell and it wasn’t clear for me which one suits well for my task. I.e. to convert my script, which is processing a lot of small files on a local machine.

It also should:

provide updates in real time;
keep output table formatting as close to original as possible.

Blog minification in a fancy way with PowerShell

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:31:11 +0300

There is no built-in support for minification in Hugo engine, which isn’t a bad thing on its own. But I had to figure out a way to minify my files while keeping building and maintenance extremely simple.

At first point I added minify for text files. It’s a single binary (written in Go), and with a single call it can run recursively over Hugo’s public folder, minifying output files in-place, just as I needed.

But minifying images is a more tricky task. I decided to use jpegtran and optipng, but they can’t be run recursively. Some scripting is required to use them. While the task of finding all the images in a folder and applying minifiers on them is trivial and can be solved with PowerShell one-liner, it was not satisfying enough, so I end up with the thing described below in this post.

Additional motivation is to have a tool that can be adopted easily to any other processing task and will give me a fancy progress report.

Hugo site

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 14:54:30 +0300

This site created with Hugo static website framework.

Project page will be a collection of non-obvious and frustrating things I found while making it.

Decision between various blog engines

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 14:54:00 +0300

Ok, now this site is officially live. Time to write something. I’ll start from some details about site itself.

Initial idea was (long time ago) to use PmWiki as the site engine. I’ve used it before and I really like it. The main drawback that was bothering me - the complexity of maintaining blog-like site on a wiki engine. It is possible, but there are better ways to do it.

Then I discovered static site generators. There is not much conceptual difference between them and file-based wiki engines like PmWiki - bunch of text files translated into html pages with some rules, but on publishing time, rather than each time on site access. And it’s perfectly fine this kind of site. There even should be a way to use PmWiki as static site generator, if I remember correctly.

Looking for static site frameworks, I quickly discovered that there is a plenty of them. And there is a good choice of programming languages they are implemented in. As it was with PmWiki some time ago, I need to compare them and decide on optimal choice.

Hello world

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 22:18:46 +0300

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