Building in Public: What Just Shipped on This Site

I built a lot of things on this site over the past few days. Some of them were on a list, some were not. Here is what shipped.

Weather card

The bio card in the hero section used to have a static right panel. Replaced it with a live weather widget pulling from Open-Meteo, which is completely free and requires no API key. Temperature, feels-like, humidity, wind, precipitation. The coordinates are fixed to my location in Kerala.

The widget has condition-specific outline SVG icons drawn from scratch: a sun with radiating ticks for clear sky, a proper cloud path for overcast, rain lines, a filled lightning bolt for storms, snowflake asterisks. No emoji, no libraries. The style is cyberpunk-ish, neon accent on the degree symbol, scanlines overlay, corner brackets.

No location label displayed. Privacy.

Now page

There is a /now page. Standard personal site thing: snapshot of what I am currently doing, updated manually.

The currently section is laid out as cards rather than a plain list. Building Vasthavam, watching Spider Noir, the usual slots. The uses section I initially added got removed. Too much static furniture.

Lab experiments

Two new simulations in the Lab.

Flow Field: particles following a Perlin noise vector field. Implemented the noise from scratch in about 60 lines of vanilla JS. Tunable controls for particle count, speed, trail length, and color.

N-Body Gravity: Newtonian gravity between N bodies. Symplectic Euler integrator, which keeps energy stable over long runs. Five presets: Solar System, Binary Star, Chaos, Random, and the Figure-8 choreography. The Figure-8 is three equal masses tracing the same path, each offset by one-third of the period. Computed numerically by Cris Moore in 1993 and proved rigorously in 2000. The initial conditions I use are the Chenciner and Montgomery values.

Console easter eggs

The site has a terminal overlay (press C). Added a batch of new commands: whoami, ls, sudo, ping, date, weather, streak, fortune, now, guestbook. The sudo response tells you you're not in the sudoers file and that this incident will be reported.

The small stuff

RSS feed at /feed.xml. Dynamic, top 30 posts by date, RFC 822 timestamps, built manually without a library.

/api/me: public JSON endpoint with site stats, current status, latest post. Powers the streak console command.

View Transitions: one CSS rule added to globals.

@view-transition {
  navigation: auto;
}

Chrome 126+ and Safari 18.2+ get a cross-fade between pages. Firefox ignores it gracefully.

Guestbook at /guestbook. Upstash Redis, 3 posts per IP per day, last 200 entries kept.

Navbar

The left nav was getting long. Concepts moved out of the top bar into a pages popup, accessible via the grid icon on the right side of the navbar. The popup also has Now, Guestbook, RSS, and Surprise Me. Surprise Me picks a random writeup or concept and navigates there.

On mobile, everything shows up in the hamburger menu under a "More" section.

That is the batch. If you want to leave a note, the guestbook is at /guestbook.