Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Tom MacWright
In October I rode the Green Mountain Gravel Growler route in Vermont with a few close friends. It’s a route curated by bikepacking.com that consists of back roads, dirt roads, and single track trails. It wasn’t as blissfully car-free as the C&O Canal or the loop around Lake Konstanz that I rode earlier this year, but in exchange for sharing the road occasionally, we got loads of variety and beautiful hills to climb up and coast down. As the name implies, the route is structured around breweries. We only did half because vacation time is scarce, but still managed to hit some good ones. The first night’s, in Burlington, was Foam Brewers. I had the “Tally Mark” altbier, which tasted like a cigar, in a good way. We didn’t get much time to explore Burlington. We did see the world’s tallest filing cabinet. The first day of riding was from Burlington to Stowe, with stops at The Bidwell for food, The Tropic for a mid-ride drink, and ending at The Alchemist. About 50 miles, and 3,700 feet of climbing. Places like The Alchemist are impossibly nice: sunshine, babies and puppies crawling in the grass, happy people playing corn hole. The delirious happiness of finishing a long day in the saddle makes it all even more saturated and exuberant. I was feeling pretty good on the bike, most of the ergonomics were working. The only gear tweak that this trip will inspire is sticking to fancy cycling bibs (shorts): Ornot, to be specific, instead of trying to scrape by with the cheap stuff, which for me is The Black Bibs. The Alchemist’s “Heady Topper” is like drinking a flat white made out of hops. .up{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr 1fr;gap:10px;line-height:0} Weather was perfect for almost the entire trip, and the route was pretty clear and empty. We mostly encountered locals riding casually, casually passing us on the way up some big trail. Vermonters are strong riders. The second day would be about 44 miles of riding and well over 4,200 feet of elevation. At this point everyone was feeling it: we’re New Yorkers and a lot of the biggest rides up till this point have been pretty flat. The total elevation change for the C&O Canal ride we did was 605 feet over 185 miles. Riding Bear Mountain and the Goldens Bridge loop helped with training, but nothing near the city can match the relentless climbing in Vermont. I expect hills to crest when there’s a turn in the road, but Vermont doesn’t follow that rule. But, every hill ends eventually. I only had to walk up one, and that was because it was so steep that I couldn’t get traction and not wheelie at the same time. To make this all easier, we weren’t camping at all, just staying at nice places and sleeping in real beds. With the quickly changing weather, camping in the cold would’ve been pretty tough. So that meant more room for changes of clothes and creature comforts. Places to stay in Burlington, Stowe, Hardwick, and Montpelier are pretty scarce though, and tended to be at the very top of hills. Seemed like everything was at the top of the hill, especially… Where The Alchemist was a casual, hippie-inflected destination, Hill Farmstead was like an elusive vineyard that happened to brew beer. And it’s at the top of a hill, of course. Like everywhere else, there were a few other people who had also biked to the hill, and lots of families, dogs, and fleece jackets. They had a food truck outside which whipped up an excellent, fairly spicy vegan burrito for me. Timing for this trip was tight, and rushing to arrive at a brewery before close had a kind of reality-TV greatest race feel to it. We were going to Hill Farmstead on a Sunday, and their hours on Sundays are 11:30-3pm. They close at three! And they don’t re-open, that’s just it. The rest of the week the bar closes at 5: it’s an exclusively day-drinking oriented outlet. But we made it, and made it to Hardwick, where the local Positive Pie location had a spectacular beer selection and surprisingly vegan-friendly menu. This was my first time in Vermont, encountering its specific brand of rural living. Many people were so open and welcoming to us, asking about the route and complimenting our endurance like proud parents. This, even though it was nearly peak tourist season and they probably get plenty of other people following the same directions. One stop in particular, sticks in my memory, the Maple Corner Community Store. If you look at the full span here: this place is a grocery store, deli, coffee shop, live music venue, bar, as well as the post office. Plus it has a little free library out front, and carries a selection of books written by local authors and signs for plays written by local playwrights that are performed nearby. It’s hard to even comprehend the level of integrated community-hub joy in this place. And, for me, they had a world-class selection of vegan snacks. The few odd interactions with Vermonters were all about land: their private land, and that we should stay off it. Not that we ever were on it - we were staying in houses and riding on public roads. But still we got reminded not to veer off and ride through apple orchards or lawns. In one sense this is a funny inverse of cities, where people control such little territory, but here the average homeowner has acres upon acres. But land rules in Vermont are very unusual: the constitution allows people to hunt, fish, and trap on other people’s private land unless it’s posted that the land doesn’t permit it, and the rules around posting are contentious. I’d be watchful too if people could just hike to my backyard and kill a deer. Then we were headed back on the Amtrak from Montpelier. It’s such a perk to be able to do this kind of trip without renting or using a car at all, just riding to and from train stations. Amtrak’s train ticket guarantees a spot for the bike, but it is always stressful and rushed getting bikes on & off. We only completed the first half of this trip - Burlington-Stowe-Hardwick-Montpelier, so there’s another Vermont trip in the future. Maybe next year! It was really spectacular. The hills were tough, but it was all worth it.
September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands. The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map, Randalls and Wards Islands look one one island because they're "conjoined". They were conjoined on purpose: they used to be two, with a bridge and everything. But then in 1955 the government announced they wanted to join up the islands "by allowing private contractors to dump debris within Little Hell Gate for free" (!) Photo from From City of New York Department of Parks: 28 Years of Progress, scanned by Erica Fischer (!) CC BY SA 2.0 The opposite happened with Fire Island: it was one island for a while until 2012, and Hurricane Sandy broke it back into two. Photo from USGS, PD Dump trash to combine islands, dump water from the sky to divide them. That's just how life is. .two-up{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:10px} Listening I watched Magnolia this month and finally got the hype around Aimee Mann. It's a little frustrating that the songs from the film aren't on And a throwback: Dusty Springfield's version of When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes. Originally recorded by the Supremes and forgive me for highlighting the blue-eyed soul version of this song but it's so driving and urgent in a way that most of the other versions aren't, it's such a good slice of that very particular rushing rhythm of the era. Reading On a meta-level: I'm getting pulled back to Instapaper from Readeck, because I rely on offline reading so often and unfortunately the Readeck iOS offline mode is unreliable. It is open source and I should contribute and in all likelihood the issue will get fixed, but in the meantime I need something to look at on the subway. Reading: I enjoyed Spiral's launch post a lot, as well as turbopuffer's post about their refactoring. Database companies in the AI-adjacent space are a nice hybrid kind of reading, still concerned with architecture and a little more grounded than a lot of the "big idea" or marketing-centric stuff that I read from AI labs. I also liked Charles Broskoski's "Personal Business" essay (one of the are.na founders). And I've been really liking reading Work by Bud Smith. Review of that soon. Otherwise The end of October will be even more packed than September for me, so if I don't post, don't worry, I'm not dead, I'm partying.
I skipped August's Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics. For a friend's birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island Cyclone, which was faster and more intense than I remembered it. But it's been 18 years since the last injury on the coaster, and the rider was partly at fault: good enough for me. .two-up{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:10px} I rode my first proper randonneuring ride: 200km (124mi) to all of the beaches around Brooklyn. It was pretty challenging, as you'd expect, but I didn't 'find my limit' for endurance, but I did find my limit in terms of how many gels & ride-nutrition packets I could consume before sugar becomes repulsive. I do still heartily endorse maple syrup packets for ride nutrition: compared to the space-age fuels that all taste like fruit or coffee, it's an identifiable substance that tastes like you'd expect. And, not pictured, but I ran a bunch of 5Ks. Haven't hit my goal this year of going sub-20, but got close in the last one - 20:15. I'm not giving up yet, because the weather is getting better and Brooklyn has a lot of 5K options. Listening Hot Creek by Duffy x Uhlmann Duffy x Uhlmann has been in my rotation for a year now and the new album has all the things I like from the combination. This and Shrunken Elvis go along well together and both have been hits at dinner parties. This album from Frances Quinlan, the frontperson of Hop Along, went under the radar, but it's so good. I've also been playing Hop Along's send album Get Disowned. I really like everything that this band has put out. It's a product of Philadelphia but I hear some of the elements that drew me to DC post-punk in the turn-on-a-dime songwriting. Get Disowned by Hop Along Watching This video, 'The surprising truth about what motivates us', is kind of an artifact of the 'Obamaverse', as one of my friends would put it. It's by Daniel Pink, a writer-speaker-self-help kind of guy, and it's accompanied by one of those realtime hand-illustrations. There are lots of reasons to tune it out as YouTube filler. Still, I thought it was pretty cool for two reasons: first, it connected directly with Andrew Kelley's video, which is the next one. And it connects with my feelings about incentives and how most simple incentives are counterproductive. And second, the drawing is real. I'm so used to the artificial version of this visual style that it took a minutes to realize that the it wasn't AI or some 'drawing hand' style of video essay, it was a real person making quite nice illustrations: specifically Andrew Park. Found myself nodding along to every bit of this interview with Andrew Kelley. His values and motivation are so nice to encounter in this current phase of tech. He's kind of a role model, which is something that I used to find trite in my early career but I'm coming around to. As Adam Neely pointed out in his video, a lot of the people heavily using Suno (an AI music tool) could not cite any role models, and defaulted to a sort of enclosed, self-centered stance. I see this with engineering too: it's hard to discern what values or talents the people at 'the forefront of the industry' have that I want. Finding personal qualities as something to imitate instead of desires and possessions (cue the segue into Girard's Memetic theory) seems like a better way to live. Reading What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention. Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge picks apart Mark Zuckerberg's weird, sad view of humanity. It's worth a read even just for the incredible opening anecdote. Home of the titular 100 foot waves. Which existed when I was a kid of course, but the larger world didn’t know about them yet. They were our secret. My grandfather and I would walk to the lighthouse and watch the waves hitting against the cliffs and he’d tell me that these were the biggest waves in the world. I didn’t believe him, of course. I thought it was standard grandpa hyperbole. But I also didn’t want to believe that I was seeing the biggest of anything. Not yet. I wanted the really great things to be in the future. Something to aim for. Which means I missed out on some great things that were right in front of me. Mike Monteiro's newsletter is always beautiful and melancholy, and this is a really nice edition of it. I read and highlighted a few other articles but they were all saying things about AI, mostly about how it makes the world worse and makes people feel bad. I won't add those to the pile because I don't want that kind of content to dominate what I mention, even if it does dominate what I read. Elsewhere For the Val Town blog, I wrote about our experience with the bug bounty program. It's been a very interesting experience. Val Town has a pretty difficult security surface: in contrast to Mapbox, which was mostly a read-only API, it's a very read-write system with many access controls. At the center of the product is a sandbox that we want to keep secure. And because we're living in the AI age, a single bit of functionality can be exposed via REST API, React Router loaders, tRPC, and MCP. Building a model layer and a shared authorization layer - modeled after Oso - has helped a bit. But the reports still come in. It's pretty wild how AI factors into it: I'd say that 100% of the vulnerability reports used AI to write the report itself. From the best reporters, the vulnerabilities come with screen recordings and evidence, and it's clearly not all-robot. But - I suspect that other people manning help desks & bug bounty programs know this experience - it's jarring to go three replies into an email conversation with someone and they suddenly stop using an LLM to write their emails and the voice completely changes, from hyper-literate to abbreviated and misspelled. I also wrote about our new authentication scheme that makes vals require login and makes it possible to manage permissions to val applications, not just their code. It was pretty fun to implement, and the sixth or seventh time working with HMAC schemes I'm starting to get a natural grasp on them.
Back in 2022, I wrote Web technology optimism hour, highlighting the things I thought were cool about the state of technology. Time flies. Let's do it again. It's still easy to be pessimistic, but it's nice to mine your feelings for the positive ones. The elephant in the room is AI, but I don't feel like throwing another post into the gravity field of that topic. Without further adieu: TypeScript 7 It's here, finally, and it's faster. In the last edition, one of the headings was "Rust and Go based tools are making TypeScript development faster." At that point we had a few upstart projects for minifying, transpiling, and bundling TypeScript. Those tools have become standard-issue. But TypeScript, the actual type-checking of the language and the language tooling in editors, was still a bottleneck. There was exactly one implementation of the TypeScript type checker, and it was implemented in TypeScript, so it ran at JavaScript speeds and had limited ability to become multi-threaded. Unfortunately there's still only one game in town for TypeScript type checkers: it's still just Microsoft. But they rewrote TypeScript in Go for TypeScript 7 and it's much, much faster. This is one of the most noticeable changes to my day-to-day coding in a while. Plus, even better: TypeScript 7 supports the Language Server Protocol! As I wrote about in 2024, Microsoft invented TypeScript and also the Language Server Protocol, but TypeScript never implemented the Language Server Protocol. So there was no standard way for other editors, other than Microsoft's VS Code, to provide language tooling for TypeScript. This was suspicious behavior because of the company's history. But now: it just works. Neovim can support TypeScript 7 with its built-in Language Server support instead of someone wrapping the VSCode extension in an LS-protocol shell. So: a big win. Hooray for the new TypeScript: it's faster, it supports open standards, and now there are two TypeScript implementations. Now all we need is one that's made by someone who doesn't work at Microsoft. The Effect ecosystem is exciting I've been writing little development logs about Effect over the last year or two. I'm excited about Effect. It's a big, all-encompassing system, but I think it has a lot of potential and is arriving at exactly the right time. This is an era of supply-chain risk and I think there is, and should be, a swing away from the tiny module ecosystems in NPM. Software that's composed of hundreds of little modules from hundreds of authors is a lovely idea that doesn't work with malicious actors. The swing is toward larger, buttoned-up libraries, and Effect is really well-positioned for that. It has type validation, observability, state management, fancy data types, and lots of functional programming helpers all under one roof, in one package that's pretty well-maintained and heavily tested. It's also very, very typed, which makes it safer to use at scale. And it makes limits a lot easier: you can just stick an Effect.timeout on anything and prevent network requests or database queries or anything else from taking too long. The same with concurrency, it's very easy to limit concurrency. It's ready for a very uncertain world where you have to validate and be careful about everything. But at the same time, it's fun to use, if you're that kind of person, which I am. Bluesky and Mastodon are successful, meaningfully decentralized systems I use Bluesky and Mastodon all the time and both just work. They don't feel like tech demos, it's not all nerds using them. The uptime is pretty good, the featureset doesn't seem limited by the technology choices. And yet both are legitimately decentralized (in different ways) networks, with really interesting ideas about security, privacy, and community systems. Bluesky is aggressively building out its protocol as an independent technology from the social network, and as I learned at their conference, there are lots of creative people building on the technology. There's a big gap between a cool tech demo and a user-friendly popular service, and both of these have bridged it. It's exciting, and shows that you don't have to accept a bad set of tradeoffs to make tech that's both principled and popular. Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and RCS are meaningfully secure messaging platforms I want to just celebrate the end of a technology: SMS. It's so good that people don't use SMS anymore: it was needlessly expensive and extremely insecure. My texts with friends are almost exclusively on Signal & iMessage, and occasionally WhatsApp. Now, WhatsApp is a mixed bag and nothing's perfect, but it's cool that the secure options recommended by the EFF and other sources are also popular options that people use every day. That's also pretty important from a privacy standard: having Signal installed on your phone is normal because it has a wide userbase, but the same would not be true if it was only used by people attending protests and being wary of government surveillance. Hardware update cycles are slowing People are hanging on to their phones and computers for longer. I'm part of this trend - my iPhone hit its fourth birthday, and I have no reason to even think about replacing this computer. With the exception of their batteries, modern laptops and phones are robust: they're water-resistant, made of durable materials, and basically just work. You could read the same data differently: maybe people are upgrading slower because they have less disposable income. I'm not sure that's true. But either way, it's good that upgrade cycles are longer: it means less e-waste, less pollution, less churn overall.
June was a big month: I went to Porto & Lisbon, and had a lot of life stuff happen. I'll get into the trip once I get my rolls of film developed. Three rolls at a new photo developing place: fingers crossed! Reading I finished reading Intermezzo (of the bag) and it was fantastic. I've always liked Sally Rooney's books but this was the one where the writing style really clicked. Also, The Vegan. Meh. I read Patricia Lockwood's 'A Tradcath Wedding' via Perfect Sentences but found an additional sentence to be perfect: Whenever they rang the chimes, which seemed to be every four seconds or so, a toddler screamed ‘WOW A BELL!’ to the visible displeasure of the celebrants – though isn’t the entire point of the ritual that you’re supposed to be that awestruck every time? Patricia Lockwood is the funniest writer I've read. You cannot grow a pumpkin, but you can improve the odds. Taylor's 'You Cannot Grow a Pumpkin' is a fantastic little prose poem of sorts. Watching I'm always trying to find a 'romp' when it comes to movies. Something lighthearted, pretty easy to watch, so on. We watched The Pink Panther this month and it is a perfect example of the genre. The inspiration for the watch came from the hamburger scene: But there's so much more of this kind of thing in the movie, little bits and physical comedy. Oh, and I also watched The Departed, which everyone says is good and is good. Elsewhere I wrote Accidental Anonymity on the micro blog, and it stirred up some discussion on Bluesky as well as at least one blog response. It was kind of an angry piece, as I said at the start. I will keep trying to stay out of the trap of writing about that topic all the time. Listening The only album I bought this month was Songs of Her's by Her's, which is fine. I wish I had something more profound to say about it given how the band met an unbelievably tragic end. Maybe more influential than that was Know Your Enemy's recent podcasts, especially this one about the pope's encyclical. I've really grown to love that podcast, and it has been part of me intellectually reconnecting with, but not readopting, Catholicism. Art Here's some art I really liked this month: This Hockney piece called 'Picture Emphasizing Stillness' from 1962 was at the MAC/CCB museum in Lisbon. Via Tim Babb, I enjoyed finding Tomás Sánchez's work.
More in programming
It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy, building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager, it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know. I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under two different names: a mostly developer-oriented blog, a photography portfolio and a one-pager gluing everything together. When I started blogging about my sabbatical journey, I was thinking about making yet another page to create a clear separation. I've decided to do the opposite and merge all my websites into one instead. As I further reduce my dependency on social media and third-party services, it has become even more important to have my own space and practice POSSE. Every decision I've made was driven by two main goals: simplicity and personality. Setup I've stopped chasing the latest and greatest. I want to keep the setup as clean as possible, which means pulling fewer dependencies. Every package adds complexity and maintainability costs, so I've only added what was necessary — no more Gulp, Sass or Tailwind. Instead of taking one of my existing websites as a starting point, I created this project from scratch. I reused some of my previous code, but I didn't want to take over any technical debt (especially with the advancements in CSS). The foundation of this website hasn't changed: Eleventy (Build Awesome). It covers the fundamentals of a static site and offers a great level of customization. I've made my project more and less dependent on Eleventy at the same time: I replaced Gulp as my build pipeline with pure Eleventy processing. I replaced most shortcodes with Markdown alternatives (and markdown-it plugins), which are better supported by editors like Obsidian. I've also replaced the Nunjucks template engine with Liquid, which comes with a few trade-offs. The main reason was to avoid creating a new collection for every set of posts I render. With Liquid, you can apply array functions like filtering or sorting in the template itself: {% assign drafts = collections.all | where: "data.isDraft" | reverse %} {% for draft in drafts %} … {% endfor %} Another advantage is having date formatting included, so I don't need another library or custom code. You can even set a default date format, so you don't have to provide it each time. What I don't like is the verbosity of the template language, although I've gotten used to it by now. Nunjucks: {{ "/tags/" + tag + "/" }} {{ modified or created or date }} {% set perspectives = ["dev", "photography", "life"] %} Liquid: {{ "/tags/" | append: tag | append: "/" }} {{ modified | default: created | default: date }} {% assign perspectives = "dev, photography, life" | split: ", " %} After migrating my existing content, I've noticed the build taking way too long, both in the dev server and the production build. I've found out that the Eleventy template cache is turned off for Liquid by default. This was useful during development, but when updating actual content, it caused every template and partial to be constantly recalculated. After turning the cache on, this issue was resolved: eleventyConfig.setLiquidOptions({ cache: true }); Check the colophon for the full tech stack overview. Perspectives The main challenge was finding a way to separate and present my main personas. The Venn diagram intersection of people interested in software development, photography and my personal life is probably small. I could use tags, but they don't offer the level of personalization I was looking for. Most personal blogs separate the content by post type (blog post, note, photo), but this doesn't fit my use case. Instead, I've decided to structure my website around three perspectives, a term I have borrowed from the Eclipse IDE. Each perspective comes with its own avatar, tagline and bio. If someone is interested in everything I share (hi Mom!), they can still view all my posts. Design Since building my photography website, I've made many changes, but I never got around to share an update. The biggest change was the design, which I have used as a blueprint for the new website. I've decided to mimic a social timeline/feed, which most people are familiar with. At the same time, it should be clear that it's a personal website and not yet another walled garden. Typography is an important part of every design. The first step is to choose between a system font stack and a custom font, which comes with the usual performance vs. personality trade-offs. I've decided to go with a uniform look across all devices. I've settled on Source Sans 3 for copy text and Hack for code. Another big change was introducing a sidebar. I always felt like the empty horizontal space was "wasted" on a desktop device, but getting the sidebar UX right is challenging. I'm happy with the result, especially with the last two panels adding a personal touch to the design. Images I've made several changes to the handling of image files. To make them compatible with Markdown editors, I had to replace my custom picture shortcode. The official Eleventy image plugin is a popular choice, but it violates my simplicity goal and doesn't support everything I needed. I've decided to go with a plain Markdown image markup and a single image file (no format fallback or 2x version for retina displays). Additionally, I wrote a markdown-it plugin to turn the optional title parameter into a caption. As for the file format, both WebP and AVIF have excellent browser support. For each image, I select the format based on the quality and file size. For my photos, I'm using WebP for the timeline thumbnails and JPG for the full-size version. Theme picker There have been some recent discussions about dark mode toggles, and I considered going for a light/dark solution based on the user's OS preference. Driven by the personality goal, I knew I had to add at least one more theme, so a proper theme picker was necessary. Similar to navigation, people like to hide the theme selection on mobile devices behind a burger menu or a dropdown. I prefer the solution by Sarah L. Fossheim, where all available themes are displayed above the page footer. A friend was scrolling through my new website, and their first question was "Why is the theme picker in the footer?". This tells me the solution was a good idea — I don't think he would have noticed a typical theme button in the header. The implementation follows standard practices: Use the light or dark theme as default based on the user's OS or browser preference. Store a selected theme in the local storage and use it as the single source of truth. Prevent a flash of inaccurate color theme. Make the theme play nicely with bfcache. I might have slightly gone overboard with my third theme, but the nostalgia kept me adding more and more features. Enjoy going back to the 90s: Feeds As browser vendors decided to remove XSLT support, I didn't bother to style my feed. Instead, I've created a new web feeds page, listing all available feeds and a short explanation. I provide one feed for every perspective and one with all my posts combined. I once offered tag-based RSS feeds. This was useful for my sabbatical, but even there I had only a single subscriber. Now, all tag feeds redirect to their main perspective feed. I've also dropped the JSON feed, despite having at least 16 subscribers. Given that every web feed reader supports Atom feeds, I don't see the value of providing a JSON alternative. A JSON feed doesn't add much complexity, but handling different media types (post, photo) and properly escaping the content is one more thing to implement and maintain. Quality assurance I've put a lot of effort into my new digital home, and I want to make sure it stays in good shape. I've included several tools, most running automatically as part of the CI pipeline: eleventyDataSchema — lint Eleventy data values like titles or dates markdownlint — format/lint Markdown files Vale — lint content (grammar, writing style, formatting) Lychee — find broken links (internal and external) Evaluatory — check accessibility and validate HTML Oxlint — lint JavaScript files Eleventy linters are another option to analyze a template's output, but I haven't found a use case for it yet. Not everything can be automated, so I also did the following manually: Test with Chrome, Firefox and Safari Test with Polypane Test with Google Lighthouse Test with a screen reader Test with JavaScript disabled Test with CSS disabled Test at 200% zoom Test with a bigger browser font size Test with custom fonts disabled Test with delayed assets Performance It's difficult to compare the performance of two separate websites with that of a combined one. Some parts got worse, e.g. bigger font files and more CSS. At the same time, I've noticed that gzip compression was turned off for anything but HTML for a few years now (I must have missed it when upgrading nginx) 🙈. One improvement was to implement on-demand assets. For example, the lite-youtube-embed CSS and JavaScript is only loaded if a <lite-youtube> element is present on the page. As before, JavaScript is fully optional (except for interactive demos in individual posts). I've been using a mix of <noscript> and CSS to hide elements that require JS (like the theme picker). I don't like the user experience of pagination, so I avoided it for years. But now that I have almost 300 posts, I've decided to finally add it. I display 30 posts per page, with images further down still being lazy-loaded for better performance. I haven't applied pagination to tag pages, as that's more complex with Eleventy. Bits and pieces Here are some other noteworthy changes: I've removed post-specific social share images and use a single WebP Open Graph image instead. I've dropped JSON-LD. Open Graph and microformats are sufficient. "Naming is hard" is a common expression in software development, but it also applies to photograph titles. I've decided to use a counter as the title, e.g. #0100. Sometimes I do come up with a title that I love, like the Castle in the Sky, so I might mention it in the description. On a photo page, you can now open the previous/next photo using the left/right arrow keys (in addition to the existing navigation buttons). It's now possible to filter photos by date, gear, or location. Check the explore page for an overview. I've learned about and used some experimental CSS features (with progressive enhancement), like scroll-triggered animations or squircle corners. I've added an AI statement on my LLM usage. I finally have a proper about page. Cool URIs don't change, but it's inevitable when moving to a new domain. All my previous URLs are redirected, except for some assets that are no longer used. I will keep the old domain, so the redirects will continue to work for a foreseeable future. I've kept my previous Easter egg and added a few more. Have a happy hunt! 🕵️♂️ Inspiration I visited hundreds of personal websites looking for inspiration. Here are a few that I kept coming back to: Emma Goto. I love Emma's approach to presenting the variety of her interests, even though I went a different route. Brennan Kenneth Brown. This website has so much to offer. It's a great example of what the open web looks like. Rex Barrett. The sentence "Collecting hobbies is my hobby." hit home — so much that I had to steal borrow it for my short life bio. Conclusion This project was mostly about merging the content of two websites into one. I knew this would take a considerable amount of time, but I still greatly underestimated the effort. In the end, it was all about the journey, not the destination. I loved fine-tuning the design and tweaking little details that probably no one will ever notice. I still have many more ideas left in my backlog. How do you like my new digital home? If you have an opinion, let me know! Reply via email
New electronica album by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
To protect against link rot and disappearing content, I save local copies of web pages I like into my web archive. Ideally, this archive is completely self-contained. I want a local copy of each page’s HTML and all the assets it depends on (CSS, images, scripts, and so on). I don’t want my archived pages fetching resources from the original website, which could disappear at any time. Initially, I was verifying self-containedness by hand. I’d open each saved page in a web browser, and check the browser dev tools. I’d check the Console tab for errors and failed requests, and watch the Network tab for requests going out to the internet. That approach was tedious and error-prone, and I wanted something better. I now automate the process using Playwright, a testing framework that allows you to control web browsers. I open each page using Playwright, and check if it’s making external requests. Detecting external requests in Playwright When you open a page in Playwright, you can subscribe to request events which tell you when the page issues a request. In this Python snippet, we start Playwright, start a WebKit browser, and open a new page. We tell the page to append external requests to a list, and then load example.com. We see that example.com makes two requests on page load: one for https://example.com, and one for a JavaScript file. from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, closing(browser.new_page()) as page, ): requests = [] page.on("request", lambda msg: requests.append(msg)) page.goto("https://example.com") print("requests:", requests) # requests: [<Request url='https://example.com/' method='GET'>, # <Request url='https://example.com/s.js' method='GET'>] In a more complex scenario, we might use Playwright to interact with the page after loading – for example, clicking a button or filling in a form, and then we could see the requests triggered by each action. Once we have a list of requests made by the page, we can inspect the url property to check if any of them were fetching from an external website. I wrote a function is_external_request to carry out this check: from playwright.sync_api import Request import urllib.parse def is_external_request(req: Request, original_url: str) -> bool: """ Check if a request has a different origin than the original URL. A request is considered internal if: - it matches the original URL exactly - it has the same scheme, host, and port as the original URL - it uses a `blob:` scheme (for example, in-memory media representations) """ if req.url == original_url: return False # Compare the scheme/host of the request to that of the original URL. org_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(original_url) req_url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(req.url) if org_url.scheme == req_url.scheme and org_url.netloc == req_url.netloc: return False # Ignore blob: URLs, which are in-memory representation of some data, # and not an external request. # # Playwright detects blob: URLs when loading media files; for example # using the <audio> or <video> tag. if req_url.scheme == "blob": return False # Fail open: if we can't decide if a request was internal or external, # assume it was external. return True assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url) I’ve wrapped these two steps in a function assert_page_is_self_contained(ctx, url), which is part of my chives utility library. The function takes a Playwright Browser (or BrowserContext) and a URL, then: Opens a new page in the browser Loads the URL in the page Checks what happened when the page completes loading It throws an exception if there are any: Uncaught page exceptions or errors Console warnings or errors Non-GET requests Requests targeting external resources The function tries to trigger important network requests that might be skipped on the initial page load. For example, it evaluates the body’s offsetHeight to force a synchronous reflow, which causes the browser to request any lazily loaded images or fonts that might otherwise be missed. Here’s an example which verifies a file example.html from the working directory: from chives.browser_fixtures import assert_page_is_self_contained, file_uri from contextlib import closing from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): assert_page_is_self_contained(browser, url=file_uri("example.html")) I originally passed a Page as the first argument, but changing the function to take a Browser or BrowserContext lets it manage its own pages. It gets a fresh page for every verification, and closes it when it’s done. (The first time I ran this, I created a new page for every verification, and never closed them – my computer ground to a crawl as my script opened hundreds of browser tabs.) If you create a new context, you can emulate different browser settings, like location, locale, and window size. Here’s an example where we use contexts to test the same page in light/dark mode: with ( sync_playwright() as p, closing(p.webkit.launch()) as browser, ): with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="light")) as light_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(light_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) with closing(browser.new_context(color_scheme="dark")) as dark_ctx: assert_page_is_self_contained(dark_ctx, url=file_uri("example.html")) In my web archive, I check every page in light/dark mode, and at 1×/2× pixel densities. It takes at least a second to run each verification, so I cache the results. As I save new pages, they’re added to a verification queue, and I’m warned of any missing assets. Unsurprisingly, the first run flagged many missing fonts and images, which I added to my local archive. Every saved page now passes cleanly. Browser is best-effort, but may still miss things Even with automated testing, it’s difficult to guarantee a completely self-contained archive. Different instances of a browser might load different assets, and a single page load might miss different variations: Responsive images – web pages can offer different sizes of an image, and the browser chooses a specific size based on the current window dimensions Appearance settings – a browser might load different fonts or images depending on light/dark mode Interaction-dependent assets – a web page might have assets that are only required on hover or user action You can mitigate some of this by testing with multiple contexts or adding post-load interactions, but every step makes the process take longer. Fortunately, most of the pages I save are simple, blog-style pages where I’ve stripped out the JavaScript. For my specific use case, initial load verification is more than good enough. Other uses for this code There are other projects where it could be useful to intercept and audit the requests made by a web page: Verifying your Content Security Policy (CSP). The CSP header restricts what resources can be loaded by a web page, and you could check that your configuration has the correct effect. Auditing login screens. You could check that sensitive pages don’t load any external scripts, which mitigates the risk of credential theft via a compromised third-party. Testing analytics and tracking. You could script user flows, like a shopping cart checkout, and confirm that tracking events fire correctly. I don’t do much front-end web development, but Playwright has become a key tool in my toolbox. I read a lot about people using AI agents and MCPs to interact with websites, but I prefer Playwright. It’s more fiddly and requires explicit instructions, but it’s constrained, deterministic, and I never have to worry about it doing something unexpected. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
It’s four years since I bought a printer. I thought I would provide an update on running costs, print sales, and profit. I’m happy to be completely transparent about all this as I know it can be difficult to figure this out if you are thinking of creating your own printing business. January 11th 2026, 11:30am All the photos here are work shot in the last twelve months. Year Four Investment? Nothing other than consumables this year. I did purchase a high-spec film scanner last year, detailed here, but don’t consider that as part of this. The scanner has paid for itself several times over, and it may become a factor in future years (see below). Income Income is made up of sales through a local gallery that I am part of, along with web sales: 5,940.- CHF - sales through the gallery 80.- CHF - sales through web shop = 6,020.- CHF total income Total income is down about 50% compared to 2025. Costs I had to purchase consumables (paper and ink), at a total of 957.- CHF. That cost is included in the total here under the “print consumables” category. January 11th 2026, 3:30pm Rental cost of space in the gallery was reduced due to having overpayments of rent and my loan to the gallery, from the previous year(s), paid back to me. -1,500.- CHF - rental cost of space in the gallery -957.- CHF - print consumables (paper, ink) -1,138.- CHF - framing/mounting/postage -1,135.- CHF - commission to the gallery -300.- CHF - web shop subscription 0.- CHF - stripe / paypal fees 0.- CHF - advertising (none this year) = -5,030.- CHF total costs Total costs are down by about 60% compared to 2025. Total Profit 6,020.- CHF total income -5,030.- CHF total costs = 990.- CHF total profit A Quiet Year? Actually an average year. The previous couple of years were outliers, due to large orders, so really I’m back to normal in terms of sales. The key factors in managing to generate a [small] profit this year were: 1) no longer having to pay back the loan used to finance the printer, and 2) reduced rental cost of space in the gallery due to a previous loan to it being repaid. Also having to spend almost 1,000.- CHF on ink this year ate into profit. This is probably a “once every three years” cost given the rate I print at. The principal cost is rental of space in the gallery - in a normal year this would be 3,000.- CHF. Essentially this means, given the material cost of printing and framing/mounting and commission to the gallery, I need to make about 5,500.- CHF of sales to break even. Solar Eclipse, August 12th 2026 That’s a grind. However I did receive two substantial orders at the end of October, which haven’t made it in to this year’s figures and should boost next year’s. Maybe even a good sign for the year to come? At least now the original investment loan is repaid, the printing costs cover themselves in most years. I may look at offering scanning services now that I have a high-spec film scanner, which could become a scan + print service. More thoughts about that next time.
