The Platform

Just finished implementing the new changes to OpenPastPaper's home page--a ton of JavaScript, ajax, HTML, and a few backend stuff. Previously, going from subject to paper to topic required refreshing the page 3 times which is inefficient and ugly--back when I was building this, I didn't know I could write good scripts and I had no idea that ajax can call the backend and get data without refreshing the page. Well now I do so I made those changes. Subject to Paper to Topics are on a single page--elegant.

I have also planned to add a simple gif containing an animation about what this site does--We will be using MaNim to make that animation and convert it into a gif and that will keep the home page clean and simple. That animation will show everything we will do--better than writing.

This is the OpenPastPaper's generated pdf after the selection of questions. look at how beautiful that is. okay, Truth be told--those images are of very very high quality and we will not use that for improving the speed of the site but hopefully, in the future, we might come to this level of quality.

I had been having some problems with creating pdf for a few days. Every time a single image was added to the pdf, it would work but then multiple images would be added with a big margin between them. This morning, I figured out why that was happening.

The size -- height and width -- of these images can sometimes be higher than the pdf itself so, the library scales it down which causes those margins to appear. I mathematically rescaled the pdf and it just worked--perfect. Let's see how the users like this and we will focus on improving the product privately from now on.

See you soon -- hopefully.