Programatic puzzle preparedness.

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 05:37:00 GMT

Today has been a rather productive day in the world of Rosealyne! I've been spending a lot of time working on automatting what will become weekly tasks for me. Today, the majority of my work was focused on programmatically generating my weekly schedule image. I'm just using a free template to develop it at the moment, the one I found was made by someone named "@ueiko_", and it's really good quality! At first I tried looking into if there were any CLI tools or libraries for working directly with PSD documents, however it seems like this is far too complicated a task as everything out there is only for parsing, not modifying. After splitting the layers into individual images I wrote I program in node.js (ew, webdev) that uses GraphicsMagick to overaly the needed assets and rander text on top of them. The same program also generates my ICS calendar file that you can subscribe to in your calendar apps. Within the comming days I hope to continue fleshing the program out to be able to have it also automatically post the schedule to Twitter and Bluesky, as well as link back to whatever art I use for the schedule that week.
Beyond this, since the last news post I've also made a node program that generates the RSS feed for the news posts, as well as adjusting all the pages to have "data-*" tags on their individual sections to mark what layout they're using. In the future I hope to expand upon this to be able to programatically generate new pages on the website from templates, as well as be able to auto update any changed links using these data tags without having to manually go through everything. Can you imagine for instance if my Twitch URL were to change some day, and then I had to go through and manually update the footer, sidebar, and potentially page contents for everything on the entire site? As much as I love having a hand made "static website" with fast loading pages, there's a limit to doing things manually, if for no other reason that being able to spend that time elsewhere.
Oh, and as of a couple hours before writing this post, xchiila marked my vgen request as WIP! I can't wait to finally be throwing money at all the cool artists I've followed over the years now that I'll actually have something to be able to request them with. So many exciting things coming my way in the future~