If you visit my blog (most likely what you're reading now) and have JavaScript
enabled, you should see a magnifying glass in the top right, next to the feed
icon. Clicking it should open up a search box that lets you perform a very
rudimentary full-text search of all of my blog posts.
It's implemented fully client-side using Rust compiled to WebAssembly (WASM),
here's all the code I added
to implement it.
At a high level, it:
- Splits all blog posts into individual words, counts them, and dumps it
into a search index that is a JSON blob.
- Installs a click handler (using JavaScript) that displays the search bar and
lazy-loads the rest of the WASM code and search index.
- Installs an input handler (using WASM) that takes the user's input, searches
through the index, and returns up to 10 matching articles.
The search algorithm is pretty basic, it gives one point per word-occurence
in the blog post, and 5 points if the word is in the title or a tag. Then it
sorts by score, and if there's a tie, by most recently published.
There's no stemming or language processing, the only normalization that
happens is treating everything as lowercase.
I've played with WASM before but this is the first time I've actually
deployed something using it. As much as I enjoyed writing it in Rust,
the experience left something to be desired. I had to use a separate
tool (wasm-bindgen) and load a pre-built JavaScript file first that
then let me initialize the WASM code.
The payload is also ...heavy:
search.js: 5.53kB (23.63kB before gzip)search_bg.wasm: 53.78kB (122.82kB before gzip)search_index.json: 323.13kB (322.76kB before gzip)
I'm not sure why the index compresses so poorly with Apache, locally it goes
down to 100kB. (I had briefly considered using a binary encoding like
MessagePack but thought it
wouldn't be more efficient than JSON after compression.) And of course,
the more I write, the bigger the index gets, so it'll need to be addressed
sooner rather than later. I think any pure-JavaScript code would be much
much smaller than the WASM bundle.
Yeah, I burned out from wiki things. I flew too close to the sun, tried to take on too many projects and cool ideas and then crashed and let people down. I'm sorry.
I participate in wiki communities because, aside from believing in free knowledge, etc., it's really fun. And then it stopped being fun, so I just...stopped. In some aspects it was nice, I spent my time doing a lot of other IRL things (I bought a bike), but I also missed doing wiki things.
And so I'm slowly starting to get back into things. I'll try to get back to everyone...eventually. I'm not really sure what's next in my queue. I'm trying to not jump back into what I was doing previously because that doesn't really solve the burnout problem but also I owe people some work.
I'll be at the "All-Day Hacking Sunday" this weekend in New York City, it should be fun and hope to hang out with people there.
It's been nearly 10 years since I created this blog
and for that entire time it's been using the Pelican
static site generator. It's been pretty good, but lately I've wanted to improve
and change some things, so I've taken the opportunity to rewrite it from
mostly scratch.
b2 is a Rust program that takes
an input folder of markdown files and spits out a complete HTML directory
of the blog. The templates and theme are taken from my fork of pelican-sober.
For the most part nothing has changed, I've just taken the opportunity to
adjust the CSS and improve some of the HTML output.
b2 is pretty specific for my usecase, I'm not planning to turn it into a
general purpose static site generator, though you're more than welcome to
fork it for your own needs.
Originally posted on securedrop.org.
As the SecureDrop team previously announced, we’re shifting our focus in order to graduate SecureDrop Workstation from its pilot phase. One of the first steps we’ve taken in this direction is to reorganize and consolidate the project's Git repositories to make development and releases easier and faster.
In summary:
Read the full post on the SecureDrop blog.
In 2018 I announced the creation of my "Skip Mobile Wikipedia" Firefox add-on, which automatically
redirects you to the desktop version of the site. At the time it worked on both standard desktop Firefox and in Firefox for Android, life was great.
Unfortunately at some point, Firefox stopped allowing arbitrary add-ons on Android and it was disabled. It was still usable in the "Nightly" edition, but that wasn't very user friendly.
Anyways, fast-forward to earlier this month, Firefox has re-enabled general add-on support, so
"Skip Mobile Wikipedia" is installable and works again on Android. The source code is the same, I haven't had any need to update it since 2020.
I personally use the responsive Timeless skin, which I think provides a nicer viewing and editing experience from my phone. Happy browsing!
I am privileged to work for a non-profit organization, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which allows me to work full-time on free and open-source software, namely SecureDrop. It also pays the bills and lets me spend me free time doing other stuff that's good for humanity, like contributing to wikis, running a Mastodon server and riding bikes.
FPF accomplished a lot of important things this year, but like every other non-profit, we're currently doing our end of the year fundraising drive, hence this blog post.
If you like my work, whether on SecureDrop or just in general, and have the means to do so, I'd appreciate you donating to FPF: https://freedom.press/donate/ (if you live in the US, this donation is tax deductible). Click the checkbox that says "This donation is in tribute of someone", and then say the gift is in honor of me, "Kunal". (You're also welcome to type other stuff, like "legos" or "boba tea".)
Hate my work? That's fine too, just pick the option that says "This gift is in opposition to" and mention my name. You could also type other stuff here, like "the Kragle" or "boba tea haters".
Now that you've read this far, I'll also mention that we have a merch store with FPF and SecureDrop swag, including stickers! If you use the coupon code "FPF2023" you'll get a 15% discount (only on Nov. 27 aka Cyber Monday).
Thanks.
