Introducing the Project Builder: A Home for My Hive Tools

Hey everyone,

As some of you have noticed, I've been building quite a few different scripts, tools, and utilities recently. Many of my web-based tools started life as one of these simple command-line scripts. I wanted to create a centralized place where you could find them all, both for easy reference and to serve as a potential starting point for your own projects.

So today, I'm happy to announce that the new Project Builder page is now live!

This page gathers many of the utilities I've built under one roof, making them easier to find and reference. My hope is that other users might find them useful as a "jump start" for their own scripts and ideas.

The "Lazy Developer" Backend

Of course, I wanted to make this page easy for me to maintain. Instead of hard-coding the list of projects into the site's HTML, which would require me to edit the code every time I add a new tool, I took a more flexible approach.

The entire list is generated dynamically by reading a simple Markdown file (project_builder.md) on the server. To add, remove, or edit a project, all I have to do is change a single line in that text file – no need to touch the site's Python code at all!

For those who are curious, here's a snippet of the Python function in the Flask app that parses the Markdown file using regular expressions to build the project list:

def _parse_project_links():
    """Parse project_builder.md into list of dicts."""
    template_root = os.path.abspath(
        os.path.join(
            os.path.dirname(__file__),
            os.pardir,
            "templates",
            "hivetools",
            "project_builder",
        )
    )
    md_path = os.path.join(template_root, "project_builder.md")
    links: list[dict[str, str]] = []
    if not os.path.exists(md_path):
        return links
    # Regex to find lines like: "- [Name](url): Description"
    link_pattern = re.compile(
        r"^- \[(?P<name>[^\]]+)]\((?P<url>[^)]+)\):\s*(?P<desc>.+)"
    )
    # A legacy pattern for older formats without a URL
    legacy_pattern = re.compile(r"^- \*\*`([^`]+)`\*\*:\s*(.+)")
    with open(md_path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as fp:
        for line in fp:
            stripped = line.strip()
            if not stripped.startswith("-"):  # skip headers etc.
                continue
            if m := link_pattern.match(stripped):
                links.append(
                    {"name": m["name"], "url": m["url"], "description": m["desc"]}
                )
            elif m := legacy_pattern.match(stripped):
                name, desc = m.groups()
                links.append({"name": name, "description": desc})
    return links

It's a simple but effective way to keep the content separate from the code.

My goal is to create a resource that might help the next person get started on their great idea a little bit faster.

So, good luck and have fun building!

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM