About Me

Hey there, I'm Tom Corelis! Welcome to my website!

My artist name is Lyjia, and I make make music, DJ, do photography, and write code under this moniker. There are links to these things right along the top of this site!

I built this site mainly to keep my programmin' skills sharp, to give myself a soapbox, and show off my art, all in a place outside the reach of social media's icy grip.

If you want to get in touch, you can email me at the following (obfuscated) address: me at lyjia dot us

About This Site

This site is a custom Ruby on Rails webapp self-hosted on an old-school Debian Linux DigitalOcean droplet and fronted by Cloudflare. For page layout, it uses Bulma CSS.

The photo features on this site are powered by a custom API integration with Flickr. For the music portion, I would love to do something similar with SoundCloud, but, at this time of writing, their API is closed for new signups. So I make do with their embeddable audio widgets instead (which work well enough for now).

Also notable is this site's blog engine, another custom job that lets me experiment with navigation and tagging paradigms (in addition to writing). While it may sound simple, a good blog with modern features is actually quite complex, particularly when you take into account needs around S.E.O. and navigation. It uses a slightly-modified Trix editor (via Rails' ActionText) on the backend and features intuitive, date-based navigation, a hierarchical tagging system, page slug renaming and redirect support, draft saving, deferred publishing, and embedded image uploading/hosting (provided by ActiveStorage). I intend to break the blog engine into a separate rubygem (Rails Engine), mainly for an enjoyable challenge. I might even open-source it, if there is enough interest!

Finally, this site is built to run extremely cheaply and maintenance-free: many heavyweight things are outsourced to cheap or free tiers of third-party services, the server auto-updates on security patches and is built on top of a rock-solid Linux distribution, and the whole thing runs on one of the cheapest and most reliable VMs out there. Other than the blog engine, nearly all the heavy lifting is handled by Cloudflare (on the frontend) or Flickr (image host), and the audio portions of this site are simple Soundcloud HTML widgets. So this site is mostly just a bunch of static pages with a bit of dynamic spice and some glue code binding it and all the third-party APIs together. I will occasionally update the site's Gemfile (sooner if some relevant CVE comes out) and that's about it for maintenance.

I suppose I could have simply thrown this whole site together with some simple HTML/CSS and called it a day. But where is the fun in that?