Matthew Lang

As great as SourceHut is, I wish there were an easier way of creating labels for ticket tracking. Importing a CSV seems like the most trivial way I could think of. If you were importing labels as a CSV, I imagine you would also want to export them as a CSV as well.

Now page updated. First time in a while, but I want to keep this updated every two weeks or so from now on.

A horrible playoff weekend for Packers fans once again.

I’m still on the fence about Matt LaFleur’s position at Green Bay as head coach. There has been criticism over decisions this year. If he stays on, I’d like to see an offensive coordinator step in and take over play-calling duties.

Not that fans of LaFleur’s Green Bay Packers are interested in any of that after their team — their coach, to hear some of the criticism — surrendered a 15-point fourth-quarter lead at Soldier Field, falling 31-27 to the Chicago Bears in the wild-card round.

I’m glad I am not the only one who struggles with resizing windows in macOS Tahoe.

macOS Tahoe has been the only upgrade I’ve regretted. The scrollbars in the web browsers are a gripe of mine as well. They just seem to look weird when they hit the rounded corners of the browser’s window.

Annoying that one of SourceHut’s Pages' limitations is their strict CSP header, which means that everything for your website needs to be self-hosted. That rules out using Tinylytics tracking for my portfolio site. I can always host it elsewhere, but I can live without the analytics for the moment.

Going to be using the website I am hosting on SourceHut as my portfolio website. It means I can keep my personal website and professional website separate.

I’ve been messing about with builds on SourceHut for the last couple of days.

Yesterday, I got a build script working that triggers a deploy for a Rails application over at Hatchbox. It’s the last part of a release script I have put together that automates deployments for me. I can see myself using this in other Rails applications as well.

This morning, I got a build script working to build and deploy a Bridgetown site using SourceHut’s built-in static hosting. I could have had a Jekyll site running probably in half the time, but I was curious to see what Bridgetown offers for static sites. It involved a bit more in the build script, but the site is working now. No idea yet, what I will do with the site, but it’s good to know I can use Bridgetown.

Most importantly, I feel I have rediscovered an interest in my side projects over the past week. Between using Zed, Claude Code and SourceHut, I have been hacking away at various little scripts and ideas just to automate a few things and broaden my programming knowledge a bit and dare I say it, thoroughly enjoying it.

Over the holidays, I gave my writing prompts website, Writeabout, a wee freshen up.

Previously, Writeabout was just a single page that displayed a random writing prompt on each page refresh. Simple, yes, but the design would not allow me to easily expand the website.

I started over with a simpler design. Display the most recent writing prompts in date order, with the added ability to explore other prompts through tags. A simple admin console on the backend lets me add and update writing prompts, and upload a batch of prompts so that future prompts are queued.

It might seem almost redundant to have a website with a collection of writing prompts that could easily be replaced by any popular AI tool. However, over time, my plan is to curate and build collections of writing prompts that retain an element of human touch in their creation.

Also, this new version of Writeabout uses Rails 8.1, my first venture into a Rails 8 codebase in production. It will also serve as a learning platform for me. I’ve already opted for a “no build” approach to Writeabout. So it’s out with Tailwind CSS and in with plain-old CSS and JavaScript.

The source code for Writeabout is on my SourceHut account.

I love this time of year for reading other people’s blogs. So many intentions, goals, resolutions and plans. It is always interesting to read what others are planning for the year ahead.

I finally managed to set up SourceHut as my preferred Git host for deploying Rails apps to Hatchbox. It means I can stop mirroring repos on GitHub. That also just leaves the Bothy theme on GitHub, but I’m hoping that in the future Micro.blog will allow other Git hosts to be used for plugins.

I’m prepared to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and see what the next three years bring to Firefox. Yes, they are planning to evolve Firefox into an AI browser, but I’m okay with waiting and seeing how this pans out before I start looking for another browser.

Looking forward to the new features coming to Bonjourr. A refreshed look and a Pomodoro timer are a couple of the handful of changes coming to the customisable start page.

I am making progress today, integrating PageFind into the Bothy theme. I’m only ensuring that the search input and results work with the light and dark schemes initially. A later update may see me use the colour themes for Bothy, but I have not decided yet. You can see a sneak preview on my blog.

My MacBook Air had been running really slowly over the past couple of weeks. Opened up the Activity Monitor to find almost 100 zellij orphaned processes still running in the background. Don’t know how this has happened, but will need to ensure that I close my zellij sessions properly in the future.

I think I’m at that point in Micro.blog where I would like a filter on the timeline page. I’d like the option to filter the timeline by Micro.blog accounts or external accounts I am following.

I added PageFind to my blog last night, but I am still trying to get it working with the light and dark scheme. Once this is resolved, I’ll see about then integrating it into the Bothy theme.

I had a little guest while grabbing some coffee this morning.

I finished reading The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey. Not quite what I was expecting from the authors of The Expanse novels. Certainly a unique story, but it wasn’t much of a page turner for me. 📚

A minor update to the Bothy theme this morning. I’m not going to lie, this is a pretty selfish update. I fixed the theme’s layout to allow additional CSS tweaks. Now I can put up Christmas lights again!

We watched Superman tonight. It’s been a while since we really enjoyed a superhero movie. I hope there are more movies to come from DC.🍿

We put the Christmas tree up this weekend, as next weekend was going to be a bit busy. Outdoor lights go up tomorrow.

I caved and bought Marked 2 to preview my Markdown files as I write them in my text editor. It feels like 2015 again.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been using Mike Rohde’s daily plan bar for my work notebook.

Initially, I started using a weekly plan bar over a year ago. Still, in the last few weeks, I’ve needed to tie my notes to that same day, so I’ve started using the daily plan bar again.

Nothing fancy, just a bar representing my day, split into 15-minute segments going from my usual hours of 8 to 5. If I am starting earlier in the day, it can go from 7 to 4 instead.

My daily plan bar is always on the left-hand side of the left-hand page of my notebook. The rest of the two-page spread is for notes and anything else that comes up that day.

It’s been a good change moving to the daily plan bar. Scoping out my day is much easier, and adding last-minute meetings and changes is easy.

In the future, I may reduce the bar to just eight hours and use the extra space for a single goal for the day.

A good range session tonight for Drew. The driver is still looking good despite not playing much golf. Hopefully the weather stays dry enough for some golf at the weekend.

Jen and I finished season 3 of The Diplomat last night. Seasons 1 and 2 were great, but it definitely tailed off for us in season 3.