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.
Tinkering with build scripts on SourceHut
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.
A re-designed Writeabout
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.