Obligatory warning: This post is about some of the inner technical workings of the site. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might find this unfathomably boring.

Sometimes, when I’ve exhausted all other interesting or productive things to do, I’ll blow the dust off the code that makes this site hum along, and tweak it in one way or another. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty thankless task. Brandon in 2015 didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to building web services in Golang, so the core codebase has historically been…unkempt, to say the least. To say the most, it looked like it was haphazardly slapped together by a team of monkeys banging on typewriters in the wee morning hours at the end of a hackathon.

If this is your first time visiting the blog (or you use an RSS reader), this post won’t really make a ton of sense. But the veteran Box Truck Buffs might notice that the site looks quite a bit different today. For reference, the old site:

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The old layout, in all of its Bootstrap-laden goodness. May it rest in sweet responsive peace.

With the truck getting a makeover, I figured it was just about time the blog did the same. Over the past few months, I’ve been working on the redesign haphazardly and in random bursts whenever the mood strikes me, and I think it’s ready (or close enough) for prime time. But why even redesign the blog in the first place?

I’ve gotten into this wonderful rhythm of publishing posts that are tragically untimely. My Spring Cleaning post was five days too late, I’d had the insulation and skylight for weeks before I’d recounted the tale, and I’d successfully picked up and put down my weight goals way before I picked up the pen and put down a post. So it’s only fitting that I’m just getting around to talking about a feature I added to the site over eight months ago.

What CMS are you using?

What WordPress plugin do I use to make a clock like yours?

You’re using AppEngine right? I can tell by your blog’s IP address.

Brandon, when are you going to nerd out and talk about technical stuff?

Right now, as it turns out. First, a little disclaimer:

This post is more for the technical types. You’ll likely find this post mind-numbingly boring if you don’t have an interest in programming or web development.

I was talking to someone, who we’ll call Michael (because that’s his name), about the truck life and this blog, and he said, “You know, it’d be cool if you had a place on the site where you could see how much money you’ve saved.” Well Michael, I agree with you wholeheartedly, so starting today, there’ll be a live-updating clock on the right left side (or bottom on mobile) of the page that shows the amount of money I’ve saved by living in a truck. I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that it’s not entirely about the money, but regardless, it’s an interesting metric to have. However, without an explanation as to how I arrived at that value, this whole thing would be pretty pointless. So here is my magic money formula.

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been slowly rolling out new functionality to the site. What I’ve added so far:

Some posts have a little black box truck icon to the right of the title, which means that I was writing the post from inside the box. Since the blog is called “From Inside the Box”, it’d be disingenuous of me not to say whether or not I was actually in there while I was writing. This post, for example, was not written from within the box, but rather a quaint little cafe in downtown Mountain View.