Matthew Lang

Just saying, Micro.blog’s photo challenge should be in October. Such a great time of year for photos. Well it is, from my back yard.

I haven’t posted a single photo in October so far, which is unusual since it’s usually my favourite month for sharing many things.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I had created a Slack account just to send webhooks to and that perhaps there was a better way of doing this. After a few hours, I have managed to put together a tool for consuming and monitoring webhooks.

Hooknook (working title) allows me to create channels and send webhooks to different channels. I’ve still got some details to sort out, but the basic application works. Users and channels are made through the Rails console at the moment, and a single endpoint accepts all webhooks coming in. It’s the absolute minimum I could do to get it to work, and now it’s happily accepting webhooks from my Hatchbox deploys.

I used Anthropic’s Claude to flesh out the structure of the application to begin with, and once I had it working, I used Claude again to add some TailwindCSS styling to the screens. These screens are definitely going to get a once-over again, as the purple is a bit garish, but my wife seems to like it, so it might stay, but be a bit more subtle.

It’s been a welcome change of pace to be able to build something in a short space of time, and even better to be able to use it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to explore adding more functionality for Hooknook and being able to handle more webhooks from different sources, including GitHub.

I setup a Slack account just so I had a place to ping some web hooks too. I don’t need the whole chat and channels thing, but Slack is great for integrating stuff like this.

Wondering now if I should just roll my own version of this. Just a channel that receives web hooks that I need.

I didn’t have much in the way of mixers to go with a dark rum, so I tried a can of Irn-Bru Winter Bru. It turned out to be a fantastic combination!

Life lesson: Parents are worse than teenagers for replying back to a text.

I started building my own MVC framework using Ruby this week. It’s intended to be a fun project to explore how a framework works internally and to see how far I can get building something that can power a few small web applications.

My move back to using my own domain as my primary email address has been relatively smooth, with just a few hiccups along the way. It has highlighted a few things that I should remember if I ever consider changing email addresses again (which I hope never happens again).

Email on your own domain is flexible

When I signed up for Hey’s email service five years ago, it meant moving away from using my domain for my email address. At the time, I had slight reservations about using hey.com as my email address, but I figured it was just an email address, and I had changed it before.

One problem is that with this type of email address, I am tied to Hey’s email service, and if I want to switch, I need to change my email address. This isn’t a problem if you use a domain name you own for your email, though. If, after a while, you don’t like the email provider you are using, you can switch to someone else while still retaining the same email address. And yes, Hey does support email for custom domains now, but that wasn’t available when Hey was launched.

Using your own domain for your email address ensures the longevity of your email address but also allows you to move between email providers.

You can’t change your email account everywhere

The last couple of weeks have seen me reviewing my password manager and conducting a spot check on all my accounts to ensure that I have migrated all of them to use the new email address.

Unfortunately, not every service allows you to change the email address associated with it. There are two scenarios I have found where this is the case.

Services that don’t let you change your email address

Some services just don’t allow you to change your email address at all. You need to delete the existing account and create a new one. This might be an issue if the service is one you have used long-term and has numerous purchases associated with it.

I have one account with a service that has several e-books purchased against it, but I haven’t been able to update my account to change my email address. Additionally, despite contacting the service’s support team, they haven’t responded promptly to allow me to change my email address. I’ll download the e-books I have purchased in the past and then create another account for any future purchases. Fortunately, these books are technical and mostly outdated, so the loss is not significant.

Services that use single sign-on

Some services don’t have a fully functional single sign-on experience, where your email address associated with your authenticating service may change. I’ve noticed this with several services. I have changed the email address on the authentication service I use to log in, e.g., Apple, but the end service I am using doesn’t recognise that it’s the same account, just with a different email. From a user experience flow point of view, this seems like a red flag.

Having experienced this, I think I might avoid single sign-on logins and instead use email or usernames wherever possible.

Not that I’ll need to, though, because I am not about to change my email address. Right?

On a Daft Punk musical bender this morning thanks to @birming.

Enjoying a quiet Saturday morning with Jennifer. Stopped for a wee coffee and cake at Black Sheep Coffee in between some shops.

I’ve been trying to write my views on a couple of topics over the last few days but I haven’t managed to get further than a couple of paragraphs. My main concern with them has been the negativity around these topics, and I don’t want to add to the existing negativity.

Given I’ve tried to write about these topics on a number of occasions and haven’t found the right tone, is it better just to leave commenting on them and hope they blow over or something good comes from them? It’s a naive view to take, maybe even ignorant, but it’s what I think I should do.

I might try to look for another couple of things to write about over the weekend and see if that helps.

Can any plugin authors here on Micro.blog tell me how you get an image/logo to appear next to your plugin in the plugins directory? I still haven’t managed to figure out how to do this for my Bothy theme.

I’ve encountered several issues since trying to migrate from Hey to Proton Mail, but the process has been mostly painless. I’m still updating all my accounts, but I’m almost done.

A couple of things emerged from this migration that others might find interesting.

1. Hey doesn’t support IMAP, and Proton Mail doesn’t support importing email using MBOX, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to move all my emails from Hey to Proton Mail. Fastmail supports importing email using MBOX, so if moving your email across is a requirement, you may want to consider this option.
2. Hey doesn’t currently allow you to send plain text email. It might not be a deal breaker in this modern internet age, but there are still people who prefer this option, and I recently encountered this issue when I started using Sourcehut. Sourcehut’s mailing lists are easier to use with plain text, so I was glad to find out that Proton Mail allows me to do this, enabling me to start using Sourcehut’s lists feature.

It will be another couple of weeks before I am fully migrated over and using Proton Mail daily.

Following the creation of a FastMail account last week, I set up a ProtonMail account today for my new personal email address. Once everything is transferred, I’ll close my Hey account.

Another couple of Atoms to Astronauts notebooks arrived in the post this morning.

I’m going through these at quite a pace but they’re an absolute joy to use. I try and grab a couple at a time when there’s a sale on for them.

The more I see cool stuff like these note codes for Obsidian, the more I want to give it a try. I really like Bear. However, it is lacking in some areas.

A double win to start the week. My ticket at work passed QA, and Annie Mueller is currently on the front page of Hacker News with her post on reading a developer’s tutorial.

Note to self, next time I need something named in my code, I’ll ask Annie. So many great names in there! 😂

Definitely a better day for golf. Watching our club’s junior team play in a regional semifinal at Haggs Castle Golf Club.

It will be a tough day for our younger juniors in the team, but good experience.

And nice to see Drew get a wee up and down on a par 3 as well.

Not a bad day for our junior golf team practicing at Haggs Castle for the Home Nations regional semifinal tomorrow.

Today, I moved the email for a domain I own from Hey to Fastmail. Lots of factors have been niggling me to do this for the past few months, but the main factor has been cost. I just don’t need to pay that price for an email address associated with a domain.

After a couple of hours, the DNS changes finally propagated through, and the email is now fully switched over. An hour after that, I had transferred the emails from Hey to Fastmail, set up the calendars, and configured the email setup in a similar fashion to Hey, as I quite liked the idea of the Paper Trail and Feed areas for emails.

There are a few things I would like to see in Fastmail, such as a bit more spacing in the user interface. However, for now, I am quite happy with the reduced cost and the fact that the email just works without requiring me to relearn a new user interface.

I still use Hey for my personal email. I’m not quite ready to move this over to Fastmail yet, but I haven’t ruled it out.

I am liking the update for iOS and macOS.

Basic Apply Guy’s run of September gradients continues. A great collection of wallpapers, with the last two having a distinct Tokyo Night vibe.

🤧 This autumn’s cold has hit early.

I’m pretty happy not really knowing what Apple released yesterday. What products and information I need to know will eventually trickle down to me. It always does.

Tried Todoist again over the last few days. Still can’t get my head round why projects in Todoist don’t have start and end dates.