In the middle of last year, I got excited about rewriting this website with something more modern than PHP, chose Vue.js as the framework, and got to work. I barely knew JavaScript at the time, so I stumbled over plenty of things like “the date formatting method crashes in Safari.” Eventually, though, I had a working app.

Well, sort of. On one hand, I achieved my main goal: a client-side web application that only asks the server for data and builds the entire interface itself. On the other, I had to bolt an army of workarounds hooks onto the framework even for basic things, like highlighting menu items or returning the correct HTTP codes. Some things I couldn’t get working at all on the first go, such as serving HTML versions of pages to Yandex, whose crawlers in 2020 can’t index JavaScript websites.

I learned a lot, but the end result was such a mixed bag that I eventually gave up on the idea and published the resulting Frankenstein on GitHub. Perhaps it will save someone time on tasks like “display arbitrary HTML through Vue.js” or “make VueI18n work with Russian.”

There’s no documentation, though. I initially wanted to explain how everything worked, but quickly realized it would take a lot of time for little obvious benefit. I’ll probably return to the subject when the mood strikes. For now, let’s call it an MVP :-)