Author: Guren

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Estimated date of creation: June 2nd, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

I first tried WordPress back in like 2005, and I kind of hated it. I find HTML and CSS kind of fun, but I don’t really like using CMS systems, usually. There’s usually some annoying boundaries that you have to operate in, and I don’t like that very much. There’s also paid templates, usually, for a better-looking webpage. Anyways, although I’m confident that I could code a YouTube clone or something, I don’t feel like putting together blogs or Yelp-style directory websites from scratch. I want to launch some Craigslist-style directory websites, as I hear that those can be money-makers. There’s directory plugins for WordPress. I’ll experiment with that.

For now, what I’m linking to is just another version of this homepage, where I have an admin account that logs into the blog, and I have made a bunch of blog post versions of these tables on the homepage. I’m probably always going to just keep updating the homepage and not these experimental replicas of it, but yeah, I learn things along the way.

This is a WordPress.org site rather than a WordPress.com site. It’s running on Linux. If I was still using the simpler version, this would probably still bore me and be trash. It seems cheaper and more versatile like this.

Estimated date of creation: May 18th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

As I’ve said before, I’m a bit paranoid about being DDOSed. When I first set up my server for these two websites, I noticed in my firewall logs that bots crawl the internet and send SSH requests to people’s servers, like, every 5 seconds. So there are constantly people trying to SSH into your server at any given moment. These are likely created by hackers, that could find something useful if they invade your databases, for instance, like user passwords or credit card numbers. I already have multiple layers of security on my servers to prevent SSH access, database access, root access, etc. Seriously, it was a sobering moment, noticing that people were trying to log into my Linux user, every 2 seconds.

In order to prevent data transfer fees, I decided to instantiate Cloudflare protection. Cloudflare can use reverse proxies and split traffic from hammering in a precise manner. It can kind of diffuse it like light through a screen so that your IP isn’t being hammered so intensely at once. I’ve noticed that many website use Cloudflare, including 4chan. A site like that gets attacked a lot, surely, by botnets, and I also read a story recently of Simmer.IO, where a DDOS cost him $100,000 and ripped apart his website. So I’m adding Cloudflare as some botnet protection.

I also did some experiments with Google Recaptcha, which I’ll use for forms in the future to prevent spam, etc. I’ll try to add a page showing what I mean soon, including a Captcha you can fill if you want to help Google’s machine learning.

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Estimated date of creation: May 17th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

This is my first project I made in Unity, apart from the tutorial. Actually, I’ve been installing and uninstalling Unity on repeat since about 2009. I never end up getting anywhere. But as part of the challenge I’m on where I’m locking myself in my room for 4 months and trying to make money from coding, I’m going to try Unity game development alongside web development.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Shinobi OST music lately, which is like 16-bit Chinese-style music. I also beat Shinobi Shadow Dancer on the Sega Genesis for the first time about a month ago. I decided to make a Unity game about ninjas, as a beginner projects. Didn’t figure out stair physics or attack physics yet, though, so this is just a walking around simulator, in a world of random 3d assets.

You can either play the game on the Unity Play website, or play it by downloading this ZIP file and extraacting it as a folder. The goal is to find the 15 hidden ninjas. You don’t click on them or anything, you just kind of count them in your head. You can’t jump, or do anything but walk. You can noclip through objects. You’re a ninja yourself.

Again, 3 options below. Option 1 involves playing it in the browser. Options 2 and 3 involve unzipping the package on Windows and running the exe.

Unity Play link

Google Drive link

Mega download link

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Estimated date of creation: May 16th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

This isn’t really that impressive or cool in a way, but I followed the in-editor tutorials that are in the sidebar of Unity 6.1, and I compiled my game that was made. It has a main menu at the front where you can try all the little worlds. I believe “escape” lets you go back to the main menu, and get out of whichever world you’re in. I customized my worlds slightly, so they might look a little different than other people’s compile of this completed tutorial. There’s a picture of Konata from Lucky Star framed on the wall in one of the worlds, for instance.

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Estimated date of creation: May 16th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

I still don’t fully trust the internet. In this journey of learning full-stack and back-end development, I’ve been thinking a lot about how not to get my site blown up. I go through a VPS host, and don’t want their computer to get compromised, don’t want weird stuff in my storage, and also don’t want my own credentials to get leaked. I’ve had to learn quite a bit about Linux security already, such as learning file permissions, keeping SSH access off for the root account, keeping sensitive information outside of the Apache domain root, etc.

Well, I’m interested in creating more advanced websites in the future, where someone could upload something to their account. Today’s project is about letting me (and only me) log into a page, and then upload something to the server. I don’t currently trust the internet enough to just leave an open upload link sitting on a webpage, where they can’t get back their data but can upload whatever. Seems like a recipe for having weird stuff uploaded to my server. I don’t really want that.

Anyways, this was quite a challenge. This was a combination of 3 major steps I’ve been working on lately, which is database usage (it calls my credentials out of the database), login screens, and upload pages.

I’ll try to add picures here soon to show what’s actually happening behind the scenes, since this is one of my mysterious entries.

Certain PHP functions I learned for this were session variable stuff like session_start() and session_destroy(), all the MySQLi connect methods like query() and fetch_assoc(), and some stuff in the “PHP.ini” file. Also, the PHP basename() function, and much more. I’ve been learning quite a bit with each of these projects, although they do probably look like pretty small steps, or even non-projects.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Estimated date of creation: May 15th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

This is a very simplistic hit counter system that just tracks how many people the page has been viewed by, or, really, how many times the page has been loaded. It just has an integer “hit” counter that goes up by 1 every time the PHP script runs, and that happens when the page is loaded. The “hit” column in the SQL database is semi-permanent. It’s permanent as long as the database or the computer is never destroyed.

This isn’t all that interesting, it’s only interesting because it can be used for a “views” tracker on a large website later.

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Estimated date of creation: May 15th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

Arguably the thing that got me into web development was finding Neocities, and specifically, this guy Andrue’s site “Voupie.lol“. I think he’s a Mexican guy that lives in Arizona or something like that. Anyways, in 2022 he was like the only person that had a Neocities youtube tutorial. So I found him that way, but he has probably my favorite Neocities site. I’m the other person with famous Neocities youtube video, mine has almost as many views as his.

Anyways, we’ve never met, but I take his ideas for my projects sometimes. This time I made my version of his Sega shrine. I’m a Sega superfan as well, probably moreso than him, and I’ve owned all the Sega consoles.

My version of the Sega shrine concept includes a Webamp player of my 10 favorite Sega Genesis BGM songs, and an EmulatorJS player of a game.

Since this site is for educational purposes, and I encourage my viewers to reverse engineer my website to learn coding, I consider this to be Fair Use under USA copyright law. The game rip was from a USA-region version.

I was going to do the SQL database experiments I’ve been doing lately but I decided not to.

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Estimated date of creation: May 14th, 2025

On my original jordanislame.neocities.org indie web website, I had made a page sort of celebrating the aesthetic of the PC-98. It has images all over it of some of the more spectacular images and animations from those games. Games like Snatcher, etc. I made a mild remake of that page, but where the image paths are stored as a string in MySQL, and the string is fetched by a PHP loop to use in the “src” attribute of HTML image tags. Just like the Gurencodes main page database-ification I did right before this, it looks like the same exact webpage.

So is this even exciting? Maybe not to you. But for me, these are steps towards being able to make advanced websites with videos that have data (like a name and view count) attached to their SQL table row, login systems, etc. It’s always good to get comfortable learning backend database systems if you want to get into web development.

I used some Bootstrap on this so it looks a little different than the original.

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Estimated date of creation: May 12th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

Is it annoying you how I’m breaking these projects up into little pieces? One could say that a single project should be an entire major website made, or a massive app made, and little side projects shouldn’t be included. However, this was a major step for me. This may be the first time I’ve used SQL for anything practical before. And I had to learn how to route PHP’s MySQLi driver to communicate between PHP, HTML, and SQL.

This main homepage is currently just typed out in text as HTML. It just sits in an HTML file. It’s not fancy. What was cool about this homepage was that I used Bootstrap and had put this on a server. But what’s cool about this other project is that I learned PHP, SQL, and MySQLi in order to use it. As of this writing, I only put two tables on the page, and other than that the page is a remake of this page you’re already on, but the table is entirely scraped out of PHP and SQL code. A PHP file tends to contain a bunch of HTML code that just is left untouched and treated like an HTML file. But in this case, we echoed out entire tables worth of data, that was sitting in a database, that was written into the HTML file by the PHP. I think that’s cool.

The other thing is that this is a major step, because now that I know how to pull data out of a database and display it on a webpage, I can soon make a modern changing mechanical sort of site like Reddit or Newgrounds or something.

Estimated date of creation: May 7th, 2025 (in progress)

Status: Online 🟢

I had learned a lot about hosting websites when I hosted by Vichan 4chan clone to www.maochan.org using Nginx, and when I hosted Jordanislame.com on an Apache server. But my two things I run Linux servers through are usually a VMware Workstation emulation (which would involve using my own personal network for serving), and a Linode cloud VPS server. For a few reasons, hosting from my own PC doesn’t really work. I’m also a bit paranoid about hackers attacking my home network anyways. So I usually use the cloud. But running 10 different servers to run 10 different websites would be expensive, wouldn’t it? Linode charges you for each one that is running. So I decided to start running multiple websites from my server computers in all cases. With Apache, that involves learning virtual hosts. (there’s a similar concept possible for Nginx btw) The easiest video I’ve seen on how to set this up is this one. Apache is an HTTP server, and having multiple websites stored in the website folders is not necessarily harder on the computer or the server than haveing one site per server. That’s because if one site is dead and the other is busy, the only thing the dead site is doing to the computer is taking up some storage space in the site folder. And if both sites are busy, it just means twice the number of HTTP requests as one site of that traffic level.

The virtual host thing is the interesting part about this website you’re reading. I forget if I had to do something special to make the domain names resolve to the same IP address. Check out this GitHub repo (I may or may not have it set to public) if you want to see how I set up the virtual hosts for an Apache server.

And I was lazy with the CSS on this website, so I just used Bootstrap, so a lot of the tables and fonts that you’re looking at are made out of prebuilt Bootstrap things. I built the animated rainbow text myself, though, and I made that like 3 years ago for the meme soundboard.