Matthew Lang avatar

Moving over to FastMail

After a few months using Proton, I decided it wasn’t for me. I found it cumbersome to use, and despite its excellent reputation for respecting users’ privacy, I missed a few features since moving from Hey.

This evening, I completed a switch over to FastMail. I managed to migrate all my email from both Proton and Hey, and FastMail has the features that I am looking for to mimic what I had in Hey.

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.

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.

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.

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.