Tag: webdev
Self hosting a PDS isn't hard (so far)
Due to my compulsive need to self-host whatever I possibly can, I decided to set up a self-hosted PDS. All that's on it so far is my Bluesky profile data, but it was a surprisingly painless process.
Somewhere, I'm online and listening to music
For a while now, my home page has shown whatever song I'm listening to (or, if idle, the last one I played). Initially, it was powered by last.fm. As I've built my own scrobbler, I populated the element from my own data. The static implementation is straightforward: I store each listen as a record. When a listen is inserted, the cache is cleared and warmed, and an update is displayed.
Designing a listen later pipeline
I've had this long, long running relationship with bookmarking and read it later services. I'll commit to one, excited about whatever feature set it offers and then, without fail, my list grows and grows and grows and grows. I archive things to reset, repeat and then move to a different service. The only thing that's ever worked has been listening to articles as audio when I have a spare moment. Sometimes it's background noise but, generally, I absorb things better as audio.
Implementing standard.site on a nonstandard site
Now that this site is written in Go, I've turned to restoring and adding more features connecting it to the open web. While I maintain a healthy skepticism of Bluesky the company, I'm enamored with open protocols and ATProto falls under that umbrella.
OKHST: predictable color generation for real interfaces
OKHST is a tone-based color space for generating UI palettes that behave more predictably across states, dark mode, and high contrast.
Deep Purple, jQuery and the role of legacy
There are people, groups, works and topics that are old just in terms of age, and everyone and their dog wants to replace them for good, often for their age alone. But that turns out to be a wild goose chase, since these are so good at what they do, and/or they command so much mindshare, that they keep going for decades. See Emacs, Vim, COBOL, paperbacks, notebooks, email.
Cloudflare for Families DNS resolver and miscategorisation
today iain learned: How to report a miscategorisation of a site/domain in the Cloudflare for Families DNS resolver service.
Why I spent years trying to make CSS states predictable
Why predictable CSS state resolution matters, and how Tasty approaches it with state maps and non-overlapping selectors.
Adding an animated card border glow with CSS
today iain learned: How to add an animated card border glow with CSS
Personal site infrastructure, diagrammed
That I even need and have made a diagram of the infrastructure for this site speaks to how over-engineered it is. Yet, while it is ostensibly a personal site, it's a personal site that's replaced many services that I previously used.
Battling bots
I've already blocked entire countries to combat scrapers , I update my robots.txt for well-behaved bots (and 403 any included in the list that access anything other than my robots.txt ). In addition to these steps, I've started blocking traffic from IPs contained in Spamhaus ' DROP and DROPv6 lists.
Better code blocks with the Astro Expressive Code integration
today iain learned: How to build better and more accessible code blocks with the Astro Expressive Code integration
Migrating infrastructure off Coolify
I've spent a while recently migrating my personal infrastructure off Coolify . Coolify 's an excellent tool and one that helped manage the initial learning curve of managing and deploying things when I started to self host things. As I got more comfortable with the process, issues and details I found myself wanting to remove it as an abstraction on top of what I had become comfortable managing.
Owning your data
Owning your own data is hard . I've been trying to own as much as I can, and my site has become a reflection of that process, both in what I display and discuss. As difficult as it is, there's a freedom in owning as much as you can.
Content-Security-Policy Reporting endpoint
today iain learned: How to use the Content-Security-Policy Reporting endpoint for automatically logging/receiving CSP violations
Screenshot DOM nodes to create favicon and Open Graph images
today iain learned: How to screenshot HTML DOM nodes and their CSS styles in the browser to create favicon and Open Graph images
Pinning homebrew dependencies
You learn something new every day. I've been using Homebrew for over a decade and, up until a few weeks ago, hadn't hit a case where I would not want to update something.
Blocking entire countries because of scrapers
I use Goatcounter for analytics primarily to see where things I post might get mentioned. I don't get a ton of traffic, nor should I expect to.
React Server Components: Do They Really Improve Performance?
Nadia Makarevich has some great numbers from a realistic benchmark. (h/t to Chris Coyier for putting it in my feed.) The whole writeup is worth reading, since it goes in-depth into several data-loading strategies. The summary is excellent:
Building My 2025 Year in Review Page with Astro
How I built an interactive year-in-review page using Astro's content collections, pulling together blog posts, movies, books, music, and more into a single retrospective. Plus: polaroid selfies, goals for 2026, and lessons about actually tracking things throughout the year.
Using Calibri on .gov sites
The US government is run by petty morons that are threatened by a font. But because the web is the web, you can at least force .gov sites to render all text using Calibri.
App selection criteria
The last app I bought through Apple's app store was a client for my Audiobookshelf instance and this reminded me why I'd built a Navidrome client . I wanted to use the web application as a PWA, but Apple doesn't support continuous audio playback in PWAs or Safari on iOS. Audio plays, but it never advances to the next track.
Turning my reading list into podcasts
linkding is one of my favorite applications that I self-host and the place where I save everything I want to read later. The catch being that what little time I can dedicate to actually reading is spent on books. What I do have is time where I can listen to things while doing chores around the house, out on walks or otherwise engaged in an activity that doesn't demand my full, undivided attention.
Deploy on push with Forgejo and Coolify
All of my projects are now stored on my Forgejo instance rather than GitHub as the latter continues to speed run the enshittification curve. I've implemented a manual deploy button in my site's admin but for other, lighter-weight projects, I prefer to deploy changes whenever I push them up.
Automating my reading progress updates
I've tracked my reading progress on my site for a bit now. I'd originally done this by fetching my progress from external APIs and sources on platforms like Oku , fetching and parsing the DOM on the StoryGraph and eventually importing and managing my own data. For years I've been reading and listening to audiobooks in Apple's Books app. Much like Apple's other media apps (music and TV, namely), Books has slowly moved in a direction that makes impor
Updating forgejo's robots.txt
I've moved all of my personal, private projects over to my own forgejo instance . It's been reliable and an altogether simple transition — I even have it mirroring the ai.robots.txt repo.
No JavaScript necessary
One of my ongoing efforts in building this site has been to embrace progressive enhancement and make it every bit as functional without JavaScript as it is with JavaScript. This has become much easier now that I've rebuilt the site using Laravel .
Analyzing the domains (and sites) of an authoritarian regime
If you've ever wondered what domains the US federal government has registered, there's a rather exhaustive list over in the dotgov-data repository on GitHub, which is maintained by CISA . You can see the raw CSV here . They don't include the registration date, but you can derive that from public WHOIS records or by examining the repository's git histor
A changelog
I've made a ton of changes to this site that I haven't yet written about. I likely will write about at least some of the changes given enough time, but I wanted to spit out a rough changelog in the meantime.
Importing artist and album data from Navidrome
Since adopting Navidrome to stream my own music I've been tracking my listening activity from my instance and have recently added pages for all of the albums in my collection, with a record for each track and the track list and track duration displayed on the album page.
My preferred GitHub alternative
GitHub's now former CEO went in for some bold absolutes on software development as a career last week: Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career. And, this week, resigned. : GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. Terrifying stuff!
This site runs on Laravel
As I've continued to over-engineer this site, there's been a mounting tension between what is and isn't dynamic. What should be dynamic, what needs to be dynamic, how often a given page or element is updated.
why I removed my self-healing URLs
the act of removing my self healing URLs
Who writes the documentation?
If the future is AI writing code (or writing much of it) — who writes the documentation? Is it the developers reviewing the code?
Another AI company lying about their user agent
While digging around for AI crawler (read: scraper) user agents to block I found another company, platform, tool — whatever — that's using an altogether generic user agent.
The 'agentic' web is nothing more than a moat
Copilot in Edge. Gemini in Chrome. AI chatbots in Firefox. Opera becomes an 'AI agentic browser'. The Browser Company announces Dia and declares that 'traditional browsers' will die. Perplexity is building an 'agentic' search browser.
A year of tracking my music listening activity
I've spent the better part of a year tracking the music I listen to day in and day out. The implementation has changed and the players have changed but the data collection, storage and display has been reliable throughout.
Despite the warnings, I tried self-hosting my email
I've been moving more and more of the infrastructure I run and host on to my own servers. One thing led to another and nearly all of what I used was there: analytics, photo storage, music, RSS, saved links and on and on. I got the itch to try this with email.
A clarified stance on blocking AI crawlers
My clarified stance on blocking AI crawlers is this: block all of them . I won't speak for everyone on the matter (I can't), but feel ok walling them all off .
Building an oEmbed endpoint
For reasons that elude me I cannot get Open Graph tags to work when anything from this site is posted on Mastodon. I've fiddled with server configs, my aggressive robots.txt and still — nothing. They work everywhere else . So I built an oEmbed endpoint.
Managing music with rclone
I've been listening to my music via Navidrome for a bit now and it's working quite well. To manage my music, I use rclone locally and on my host machine.