Blog Badge Unlocked!

I had the weekend to myself with the spouse on a business trip. While cleaning out my closet, I found a collection of cassette tapes from my youth, along with my casette player that still worked! Check out the Spotify playlist at the top of this entry for a sampling of what I found.

Then headphones went on and the code really hummed. Here’s what I learned this weekend.

Jekyll - Static Page Generation 📝

Static Pages aren’t new to me, but this specific tool was. The build was fairly simple - it took longer to find a template design I liked than to build the site itself. The new part to me was the deployment process, which I configured using both Cloudflare and Netlify (just to see how both worked). In the end, I felt more confident in the Cloudflare deployment since I have more experience with it. I do expect to revisit Netlify in the near future on a Mastodon bot I’m working on.

I played around and added a few includes - a spotify playlist that you see on this page, and a mastodon post embed, which I’m still fiddling with.

The deployment process is just plain magic. I love it. I know that this is old news to most developers, but coming from a small shop that runs on caffeine and a patch quilt of MVC, ASPX and React - I finally get it. I’m all in.

Mastodon Bots 🤖

I continued working on a little Mastodon Magic 8 Ball Bot in Node.js. Most of the work has been putting up guardrails to ensure my bot doesn’t go crazy on the Fediverse. I think all of the logic is in place, just needs some refactoring and documentation. It will be my first public GitHub repo.

Incident Response Investigation and Documentation

Not how I think anyone imagined spending a Saturday night, but I happened to see @KrisNova starting up a Twitch live and decided to join. A spike in traffic had occurred and slowed the Hachyderm server to a crawl for a few minutes. It was intriguing to watch Nova work through the investigation and documentation process. I made some notes for our own processes in the future. I never understood what people got out of watching someone else code, but it’s starting to make sense to me now. Very informative.

Audio Editing - Ice Cubes App

On Sunday morning, I woke up and did my morning Mastodon newsfeed read. An up and coming Mastodon client, Ice Cubes, was asking for user submissions for the notification sound. I grabbed a whiskey glass and made some sounds using my iPhones Voice Memo app, then did some filtering and pitch changes in Audible. Audio editing was one of the first things I got PAID FOR in relation to development work, and it was good to see those brain synapses were still connecting. It may just make it into the app! A fun diversion.

Cloudflare Migration for Box464.com

Finally, I transitioned over to the new Jekyll based structure for my site, ensuring all of the IndieWeb bits and pieces I’ve added recently got ported over. It’s pointing to the right places and showing up as expected. I’m never satisfied so I’m sure I will continue to tweak it. But now, time for some sleep.