Lately, I've been working on a side project related to something I originally created for comiCSS. I built a website for the 4Connect game where I can publish games that aren't necessarily related to CSS or web development: fourconnect.net.

I'm really happy with how the project is coming along. It's built entirely with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (no libraries, no frameworks, no gimmicks), and no back end. Everything is essentially static, except for the game logic itself, which naturally requires JavaScript.

The site is already fully functional, although category filtering still needs work, and the archive page is especially rough right now. My next steps are to improve those two areas.

Unlike some of my other projects, this one includes a small amount of external code from Google for analytics, mainly so I can track how the project grows over time.

I also considered adding ads, but for now I’ve decided to keep the site completely ad-free.

The entire project is public on GitHub, and the site is hosted on GitHub Pages with automatic deployments whenever changes are pushed. That setup has been working really well.

You might ask: "But Alvaro, if the site is static and the game changes daily, how do you update it? Do you use JavaScript for that? Do you do daily pushes/deployments? Wouldn't that be incredibly inefficient and painful?"

And you'd be right... but I barely use JavaScript for that part. Instead, I took advantage of GitHub Actions and created (with a little machine assistance) a Python script that automatically updates the index and archive pages based on the current date.

I also bought the domain for ABCnagrams, and I'll probably build something similar for that game as well.

Vacation

As a side note, starting next week, I'll be taking a short vacation. I'll be traveling through beautiful Australia and New Zealand and exploring the countryside there.

It'll take some time away from my projects, but I'm sure I'll come back refreshed and full of new ideas for comiCSS. By then, I should also have enough 4Connect games prepared to keep new content coming out for several weeks, even while I'm on vacation and can't update it manually.

I hope you are doing great. See you soon!