danlliu.github.io

The third iteration of my personal website!

License

Copyright 2023 Daniel Liu

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Infrastructure

Main Page

index.html is rendered from Jinja templates and static data.

Front-End:

• HTML
• Tailwind CSS
• JavaScript

Rendering / Templating:

• The data for the website is stored in the src/data directory.
• HTML templates are stored in the src/templates directory.
• These files are interpreted by templates.py to generate the rendered HTML files in build.
• To generate the CSS file, npx tailwindcss is used to generate the required CSS tags.
• JavaScript files are copied from src/js to the build/script directory.

"Super Secret" Terminal Mode

The fun begins! Terminal mode is an easter egg I wanted to add that ended up becoming the majority of this project.

The HTML for terminal mode is rendered in a similar fashion, although there's no template data at all. I reuse the same infrastructure for simplicity.

All of the logic behind terminal mode is written in C++, and compiled to WebAssembly using Emscripten. Terminal mode also uses some JavaScript to act as a bridge between Wasm and the DOM (in terminal_mode_interface.js).

wash: the WebAssembly SHell:

Terminal mode relies on a completely emulated filesystem, which contains the contents of my website, but in textual format. The interface between these files and the terminal is a shell called wash. wash implements a subset of shell commands (shown below), allowing the user to move around the file system, read files, and even create new files and write to them!

The code for the filesystem is in filesystem.hpp and filesystem.cpp. The code for wash is in wash.hpp and wash.cpp. wash also utilizes args.hpp for argument parsing, thanks to @brenfwd for writing that!

Terminal Emulation:

For terminal mode, we need a terminal! The terminal emulator code is in terminal_emulator.hpp and terminal_emulator.cpp. This implements an ANSI escape code-compatible terminal, including 256 color support!

The current list of commands supported are:

clear
pwd
echo <args...>
sleep <time>
cat [file]
cd <path>
ls [path]

Makefile

The Makefile chains together all of the necessary build steps. To build the website, run

$ make

To spin up a server using Python's http.server, run

$ make server