We Need to Bring Back Webrings

The year is 1996. You feed your Tamagotchi, get a Squeezit and turn on the home computer. You’ve told your family they can’t do phone calls for the next hour. The dial-up modem makes beeping sounds. You’re online.

Yesterday you found this fly website about amateur radio, and you want to explore more—but how can you find related websites? Yahoo is slow and not really showing you what you’re looking for. Then you notice that this website is part of the “Amateur Radio Webring”. You click the arrow to the right and dive into another website about amateur radio.

Archive Your Old Projects

Yesterday, while looking through a folder called old things lol glhf, I fell into a rabbit hole of old abandoned projects—mostly websites and graphic design, but I also found one or two Flash projects and compiled .exe files.

And, while it was really fun remembering projects I’ve long forgotten, there was no structure, and it was often difficult to figure out what a project did and what it looked like—some even missed crucial data. This made me think about how I want to archive my projects going forward.

My App Defaults

In episode 097 of the Hemispheric Views podcast, the hosts discuss their app defaults, which has inspired some people to share their own.

Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator

I’ve used a lot of static site generators in the past, and they all have their own features and quirks, but most importantly, you have to architect your website to match what the framework expects.

Since yesterday, this website has been powered by my own SSG. It’s not meant to be reusable, it’s just normal code—parsing and generating files for this specific website.

And oh boy do I love it.

Static OG (Open Graph) Images in Astro

Have you every shared a link to a friend and wondered where the image preview came from? That’s the Open Graph Protocol, a set of HTML <meta> extensions that can enrich a link, originally invented at Facebook. This blog post describes how you can generate these images on build time in the Astro web framework.

You’re Using Email Wrong

You probably don’t like email, not a lot of people do. That’s because you’re using it wrong.

Chances are that if you look at your inbox, it’s full of unsolicited marketing emails, log-in notifications or spam. Or you’re doing inbox zero and all that trash lives in your archive.

As everything else, email is subject (hah) to entropy. If you’re not careful, chaos will take over.

Plex on NixOS

A few weeks ago, the hard drive (yes, I know) in my home lab died. It was a sad moment, especially because I ran Plex on it and rely on that for my music and audiobook needs.

The upside is that it gave me the opportunity to rethink my Plex setup. Hosting it at home is great for storage costs and control, but it’s hard to share with friends or access on the go, especially with a NATed IPv4, so I decided to move to the cloud.

Hello World

I’ve had many blogs, but this is the first post on this site, so stay tuned. ❤️