Sat, 21 Mar 2026

Another fun project

I really enjoyed using my hands and some tools to help Taylor build a bed platform in her van. She and Nanette are touring the southwest now; expected back around here in about 10 days. It was great to see something physical take shape in the real world. And Taylor sounds like she’s happy with it — it’s always nice to have positive reinforcement.

My latest project highlights how well my pre-retirement jobs fit my interests. I’m very happy to be retired, and recommend it to almost everyone (I do think there is a lot of learning and growing to be gained by the variety of jobs, bosses and organizations you can experience over a few working decades).

There is a subtle update to this blog as a result of that project. I’ve given thought to adding topic tags here for a while. And there is a Blosxom plugin to do that, but I’ve also been interested in the buzz around Rust lately, and thought it would be fun to learn a new language.

So at the bottom of blog posts now is a little “Topics” section. As part of that, I realized the monthly list had grown pretty long (over 1500 posts over 22 years is a fair amount). So on the left are two HTML details sections: one with the monthly list and one with the new topic list. Finally, I was able to replace a JavaScript library that I was only using for help handling the comments. It was a large file with lots of cool functionality, that I was barely using. JavaScript has progressed to more standardized support; so I think my “fetch” replacement for “AJAX” will serve me well.

That JavaScript file was from the early 2000s, as is Blosxom, the blog engine I use here. As a happily retired person, I appreciate the wisdom and experience which comes with age and don’t want to discount age just because there are newer, younger things out there. But another reason I wanted to use Rust for my tagging project is that Perl is slowly being diminished. When I started working on the integration between Rust and Perl, I realized my workstation didn’t have some of the needed Perl modules and getting them was not going to be super quick and easy. I just pushed along with “development in production” — something I would have had to frown on in my prior, tech managerial jobs.

I am giving a little bit of thought to rewriting Blosxom in Rust so I don’t run into an update to our servers that makes it hard to get the required Perl modules installed. I do have to say that Blosxom is very flexible and does all I need it to do (if I do rewrite it, it won’t be that cool and flexible). And I was really pleased to be able to graft in my updates and still benefit from the core reverse chronological ordering of posts. Also, with a little manipulation of the URL, topic tags restricted to dates work as well (just as they do by default): Alexandria vs. Alexandria in March, 2026. It was cool to me that both those just worked as expected.

I won’t build a full Rust-based web server if I go down that path. I’m happy with the wisdom and experience that comes with GGI, which has been a part of the web since almost it’s very first days. There are more modern ways to build out interactivity, but I know I don’t need that level of sophistication or performance for my little world. I happened upon this post recently about performance of Rust and CGI.

If you’re still reading this, I will also say that I was in no rush and wanted to learn a bit about this new language. So, I chose not to use AI for this at all. I expect AI would have been happy to help me out, would have been much quicker and likely would have produced more solid code. But I would not have learned as much about what makes Rust work and how it differs from other languages. This NYT article about AI assisted programming was an interesting read as I worked on this.

And this fun project has been a throwback, in some ways, to the very first work I did on the web for AARP’s website. In those early days, the AARP IT leadership was all about supported software. Our DEC servers came with a C compiler from DEC so I was told I had to use C for our web interactivity even though Perl was around then (because open source Perl was not commercially supported). Perl, being a higher level language was much safer for public interaction than homegrown C code, and DEC was certainly not going to support my crazy programs. (Eventually, we convinced them that Perl was a better fit.)

As a reward for anyone reading this far: my tagging code.

I expect I’ll slowly go back over some of those 1500+ entries and add some appropriate tags. But for now, back to regular blogging about life rather than reflecting on blogging itself :)

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