Was chatting with Noam yesterday about static sites vs WordPress sites and it reminded me that this site existed and needed some love.
The biggest point of friction with posting here has always been creating the file for a new post…getting the right folder, the frontmatter format, the slug. It’s a small thing, but enough to keep me from posting for a long time. That, and the fact that I’ve been busy adding daily photos on mutelife instead.
Anyway, I ended up creating a slash command for Claude Code that lets me spin up a new post with the right structure in seconds. No more excuses. It works like so:
/new-post New post title goes here
It then walks me through a few questions to set up the file. It asks whether the post has photos, which tags to use, and automatically generates most frontmatter for me.
Oh, also tidied up a couple of things around the site that were out of place.
Been working on a new set of stickers and finally got them printed.
Pushed some changes to the site, including an up-to-date about page, and a new defaults page.
This blog is now automatically published to Mastodon, via a custom-built script that I’m running on GitHub Actions. Here’s the breakdown:
- A new post is added to the blog.
- The script in GH Actions is triggered by a deployment status event.
- The script fetches the post from the blog, and formats it for Mastodon.
It’s a bit of a hack, but it works for now.
New micro blog
Decided to re-launch this micro blog and take it on as a learning side project.
I’ve rewritten the entire thing twice. First, with Astro, which was a fun but somewhat painful experience. Took me a couple of weeks to build what I wanted. Astro is great, but in the end it just didn’t click for me.
The second time I re-wrote it with SvelteKit, my favorite framework. Took me one day and a half to put the entire thing together. Svelte is super intuitive, exciting to work with, and very designer-friendly. Highly recommend playing with it!
This site now has maps, such as this one of Lisbon or this one of Tokyo. It also has blog posts and a neat about page and links to other sites such as keyframr.com.
Bonus, here’s a photo of a recent trip.
I got stung by a bee in my left foot, but not even that could ruin the most incredible afternoon we’d had in Japan.
mutelife.com/2024/02/blissful-odaiba/
I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me.
alistapart.com/article/i-am-a-creative/
Starting in South Korea and finishing this trip in Japan meant that Tokyo was the last place we’d be visiting. We had traveled from North to South (Seoul → Busan), then West to East (Osaka → Kyoto), and now Tokyo was waiting for us.
mutelife.com/2024/02/konnichiwa-tokyo/
