dotfiles

Finally got around to setting up my dotfiles properly. After trying a custom written bash script with symlinks, stow, and looking up home-manager, I’ve settled on a bare git repository. It’s simple, has no dependencies besides git, and just works. For a guide to set it up, use the Atlassian Dotfiles Tutorial - Bare Git Repository.

Workflow

I use neovim as my primary editor with tmux as a terminal multiplexer to manage my workspaces. The Primagen’s tmux-sessionizer is the best tool I’ve found for my tmux workflow. Make sure to add double quotes around the variables that store folder names to make the script work for folders with spaces. See my dotfiles for the fixed script.

I’ve also started to use KDE’S virtual desktops for quickly switching between workspaces, and I’m enjoying flitting between windows.

In the end, though, I don’t think any of this is for any productivity boosts. Instead I’m just simplifying things that have annoyed me when I’m working on my projects. And it’s fun.

Old-school Web Apps using CGI

I know I’m late to the party, but I’ve been exploring the old web movement and loving it lately. While going through endless wiki links, I discovered a little thing called CGI scripting for building websites. And as an avid shitty website-builder myself, of course I had to try it out.

This project is built and hosted on tilde.club. I will not touch on the server-side configuration for building CGI websites as it is managed fully by the website admins, which I am thankful for.

Picking a language

After years of programming and getting stuck on deciding frameworks and languages, I’ve grown to hate the whole process of deciding on every single minute detail before I even start. So I chose Perl for the sole reason that the wiki says that “Perl was the main language of choice back in the heyday of CGI programming.”, despite never having used Perl before. And being an xkcd fan, I’ve always felt left out on the Perl jokes.

Basics

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Status: 200";
print "Content-Type: text/plain";
print "";
print "Hello World!";

Just look at it. It looks almost stupidly simple, but after copying it to my public_html folder, it works flawlessly. Well, after forgetting to and then changing the executable permissions, it works flawlessly.

Silly features

The first thing I made was the quintessential counter.

# functions to read and update the counter file
sub read_counter {
    if (-e $counter_file) {
        open(my $fh, "<", $counter_file) or die "Cannot open file $counter_file: $!";
        my $visits = <$fh>;
        close($fh);
        return $visits;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}
sub update_counter {
    my ($visits) = @_;
    open(my $fh, ">", $counter_file) or die "Cannot open file $counter_file: $!";
    print $fh $visits;
    close($fh);
}

Calling these functions on page load every time, I save the counter values to $counter_file As of 2025-07-02, the website’s been loaded 6414 times!

Etc

There’s also a bunch of other features I added, including a message board and a like system. Feel free to look at my mess of a codebase to see how they work. Have fun making your own CGI app!

avijya