jpshlk.com

Tags as Content: Why I Made Each Tag an MDX Page

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 6 of my rebuild series. In part 5 I turned the homepage into a landing page.

On the old site, tags were whatever strings I happened to type into a post’s frontmatter (the metadata block at the top of the file). Nothing stopped mac, Mac, and macs from quietly becoming three different topics. On the rebuild, tags became their own content collection: every tag on this site is a small MDX file with a name, a description, and room to grow.

That sounds like overkill for a personal blog. It stopped sounding like overkill the first time I typo’d a tag and the build failed instead of silently shipping a broken tag page.

Tags as a content collection, not strings

In Astro, a content collection is a folder of files with a schema: the build reads every file and type-checks its frontmatter before anything renders. The tags collection sits right next to the blog in content.config.ts:

const tags = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.mdx', base: './src/content/tags' }),
  schema: z.object({
    name: z.string(),
    description: z.string().optional(),
  }),
});

The important half lives on the blog side. Posts don’t declare their tags as plain strings; they declare references into that collection:

tags: z.array(reference('tags')).default([]),

reference('tags') means every tag in a post’s frontmatter has to match a real file in src/content/tags/. Write tags: ['astr'] and the build stops with an error naming the post and the bogus tag. The typo that used to become a ghost page is now a compile error.

What a real tag page buys you

A slug like ios can’t tell you it should be displayed as “iOS” and not “Ios”. A file can. Every tag carries a proper display name and a one sentence description:

---
name: Rebuild
description: Documenting the 2026 rebuild of this site with Astro 7, Tailwind 4, and a lot of help from AI.
---

The tag page template reads both. The name becomes the heading and the breadcrumb, correctly capitalized, and the description renders right under the heading and doubles as the page’s SEO description. So a tag page opens with an actual sentence about the topic instead of a bare slug floating over a list:

Two smaller wins ride along. A tag with zero published posts gets no page at all (the route only generates when something actually uses it), so there are no empty stubs for crawlers to find. And because the files are MDX, each tag has a body waiting for the day I want tag pages to open with a real intro; the rebuild tag already has one written, sitting in its file until I wire it up.

The cost side

The price is one small file per tag, and you pay it up front: a tag can’t exist until its file does. Tagging a post with something new means stopping to create src/content/tags/whatever.mdx first.

That friction annoyed me for about a day. Then I noticed it was doing exactly what a taxonomy needs: making me decide whether a topic really deserves a tag before it exists. Is it webdev, web-dev, or web-development? There’s one file, so there’s one answer. The site has seventeen tags with real names and descriptions, and that beats forty misspelled strings every time.

If your tags are strings that occasionally typo into ghost pages, give them files. It’s the rare bit of structure that costs one folder and pays you back on every post. 🤙

Turning My Homepage Into a Landing Page

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 5 of my rebuild series. In part 4 I built the design system these pieces are made of.

The single biggest reason for this rebuild wasn’t technical. It was that my homepage said nothing about me. You landed on a list of posts and had to click “About” to learn whose site you were on. Most personal sites work like that because most blog themes work like that.

The new homepage flips it: who I am first, blog second.

The anatomy

The page is three sections, each its own component in src/components/home/:

// src/pages/index.astro (the important part)
<BaseLayout title={AUTHOR.name} description={SITE.description}>
  <Hero />
  <WorkSection />
  <LatestPosts />
</BaseLayout>

Hero: photo, a big ”👋 I’m Josh,” the “Digital Duct Tape @ Plantonix” line (pulled from src/config.ts, not hardcoded), a short intro, and two buttons (read the blog / see my work). It also owns my favorite flourish on the whole site: the faint code snippets peeking in from the margins. Those are real snippets from this site’s source, syntax-highlighted at build time into a little pool, and a script deals a random pair on every visit.
WorkSection: cards for CocoCalcs, my iOS Shortcuts on RoutineHub, and QuartFlow. These come from a tiny projects content collection (part 6 explains collections) where each project has a featured flag, so changing what’s on the homepage is a one-line frontmatter edit, not code.
LatestPosts: the five newest posts, reusing the same PostCard component the blog page uses.

Sections have anchor IDs (like #work), so the hero’s “See my work” button can jump straight down the page, and WorkSection links out to the full /projects/ page for everything that didn’t make the featured cut. Fun fact: the first version of this page had more sections, including a Hobbies grid with emoji cards. I cut it the next day. Getting to delete your own ideas cheaply is half the point of building from components. And if you want to see how these components nest inside the layout, the full visual map lives at how this site works.

The About page stays (with a smaller job)

My original plan, and an early draft of this very post, had the landing page replacing the About page entirely. I talked myself out of it. “Who is this person” and “tell me everything” are different questions, and cramming the long answer onto the homepage would have rebuilt the exact wall of stuff I was tearing down.

So the split is: the homepage introduces me in ten seconds, and /about/ is for people who want the long version. That page also absorbed two things that briefly lived as their own pages, a “What I’m doing now” section at /about/#now and a “What I use” section at /about/#uses. One page to keep fresh instead of three.

The old URLs can’t 404, because links to them exist in the wild. Astro handles that in config:

// astro.config.ts
redirects: {
  '/aboutme': '/about/',
  '/uses': '/about/#uses',
  '/now': '/about/#now',
},

(These get mirrored in public/_redirects with a 301! force flag, because Astro also emits meta-refresh stub pages at those paths that would otherwise shadow the real redirect. Ask me how I know. 😅)

That /aboutme one is fun: an SEO validation tool (part 7) scanned every link in every built page and found one of my old posts linking to /aboutme, a page that hadn’t existed for years. A dead link I’d never have noticed, caught by a robot. 🤖

The random quote bug (part 4’s rule, striking again)

The old homepage had a widget that showed a random quote on each visit. Porting it uncovered the exact bug class from part 4: the old script ran once, as a module, on initial page load. With view transitions, navigating back to the homepage doesn’t re-run module scripts, so the widget silently died and showed nothing.

The rebuilt version does a few things differently. The quotes are bundled into the page at build time (no fetch at all; they’re just JSON in the HTML). The widget got a promotion out of the homepage and into the footer, so every page shows one. And the picking logic lives in BaseLayout.astro instead of the component, listening for astro:before-swap:

// src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro
function showRandomQuote(doc: Document) {
  const container = doc.querySelector('[data-random-quote]');
  const data = doc.querySelector('[data-quotes]');
  if (!container || !data?.textContent) return;
  const quotes: Array<{ text: string; author: string }> = JSON.parse(data.textContent);
  const quote = quotes[Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length)];
  if (!quote) return;
  container.querySelector('[data-quote-text]')!.textContent = `“${quote.text}”`;
  container.querySelector('[data-quote-author]')!.textContent = `— ${quote.author}`;
}

showRandomQuote(document);
document.addEventListener('astro:before-swap', (e) => {
  const doc = (e as Event & { newDocument: Document }).newDocument;
  showRandomQuote(doc);
});

Why astro:before-swap and not the astro:page-load event from part 4? Timing. page-load fires after the new page is already visible, so the quote would pop in a beat after the crossfade. before-swap hands you the incoming document before it’s shown, so the quote is already sitting there when the page appears. (The first load has no swap, hence the direct call.)

Bonus: every page you visit now deals you a fresh quote, which is honestly how a random quote widget should have worked all along.

One small SEO note

The homepage <title> used to be just jpshlk.com. It’s now my name, because the title is what shows up in a Google result, and “Josh Pasholk” tells a searcher more than my domain repeated back at them. Little stuff like this comes from the SEO tooling nagging me, which is part 7’s whole story.

Next up: migrating 22 posts without editing a single one.

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

A Tiny Design System and a Dark Mode That Works

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 4 of my rebuild series. In part 3 I scaffolded the empty Astro 7 project.

Before building any real pages, we built the pieces pages are made of. And in the process, finally fixed the dark mode toggle that had been quietly broken on the old site for as long as I can remember. The old config literally had a comment next to the theme setting that said “Does not work yet.” 😅

What “design system” means for a blog

Forget the enterprise version of that phrase. At personal-site scale, a design system is three things:

Tokens: the named values everything uses. A primary color scale, one font (Inter), consistent grays. They live in the @theme block from part 3.
A handful of components. Mine has eight: Link, Button, Card, TagPill, Prose (styles post content), Header, Footer, ThemeToggle.
A styleguide page: a private /styleguide route that renders every token and component in both light and dark mode. When I tweak the design, I look at one page instead of clicking through the whole site. It’s marked noindex and left out of the sitemap, so it’s for my eyes only.

The point of building this before the homepage: every later page is just arranging pieces that already look right.

If you want the visual version of how all these pieces compose (layouts, slots, the whole component tree), I keep a living diagram at how this site works.

Why dark mode toggles break

Here’s what I learned about why my old toggle failed: two separate bugs, both classics.

Bug 1: the flash (FOUC)

The theme choice lives in localStorage, which only JavaScript can read. If that JavaScript runs after the page paints, dark-mode users get a blinding white flash on every load. That’s called FOUC, short for flash of unstyled content.

The fix: a tiny script in the <head> marked is:inline, which tells Astro “don’t optimize or move this, run it right here, before anything renders”:

<!-- src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro -->
<script is:inline>
  (() => {
    const apply = () => {
      const stored = localStorage.getItem('theme');
      const dark = stored
        ? stored === 'dark'
        : window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches;
      document.documentElement.classList.toggle('dark', dark);
    };
    apply();
    document.addEventListener('astro:after-swap', apply);
  })();
</script>

In plain words: check for a saved choice; if there isn’t one, follow the system setting; apply the dark class before the first pixel paints.

Bug 2: view transitions eat your JavaScript

This site uses Astro’s view transitions (the <ClientRouter /> component) for those smooth animated page changes. Under the hood, clicking a link doesn’t do a full page load. Instead, Astro fetches the next page and swaps the document.

That swap is where naive theme code dies twice over: the fresh document arrives without your dark class (instant un-theming), and your click handlers were attached to elements that just got thrown away (the toggle goes dead after one navigation). That was my old site’s bug. The toggle worked until you clicked a link. Then, nothing.

Astro provides events for exactly this. astro:after-swap fires right after the new document lands; that’s the apply listener in the snippet above, re-applying the theme mid-swap. And astro:page-load fires after every navigation, which is where the button wires itself up:

<!-- src/components/ThemeToggle.astro -->
<script>
  function bindThemeToggles() {
    for (const button of document.querySelectorAll('[data-theme-toggle]')) {
      button.addEventListener('click', () => {
        const dark = !document.documentElement.classList.contains('dark');
        document.documentElement.classList.toggle('dark', dark);
        localStorage.setItem('theme', dark ? 'dark' : 'light');
      });
    }
  }

  document.addEventListener('astro:page-load', bindThemeToggles);
</script>

The rule of thumb I took away: on a view-transitions site, any JavaScript that touches the page must run on astro:page-load, not just once at startup. This one rule explains the theme toggle, the mobile menu, and a random-quote widget bug coming up in part 5.

Did it actually work?

We tested it with an automated browser: load the site with dark system settings (no flash), toggle to light, navigate through five pages (stays light), toggle again (still responds). All green. The styleguide got screenshotted in both themes for a visual once-over.

Next up: turning the homepage into an actual landing page.

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

Starting Clean With Astro 7 and Tailwind 4

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 3 of my rebuild series. In part 2 I backed up the old site to a git branch.

With the backup in place, it was demolition day. Everything in src/ got deleted except two folders: src/content/ (my actual posts) and src/assets/ (my images). Content is cargo; code is the ship. We were only replacing the ship.

The entire dependency list

One thing I love about this rebuild: I can explain every single package. Here’s the new package.json, dependencies only:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@astrojs/mdx": "^7.0.2",
    "@astrojs/rss": "^4.0.19",
    "@astrojs/sitemap": "^3.7.3",
    "@fontsource-variable/inter": "^5.2.8",
    "@jdevalk/astro-seo-graph": "^2.2.0",
    "@jdevalk/seo-graph-core": "^0.7.0",
    "astro": "^7.0.7"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@astrojs/check": "^0.9.6",
    "@tailwindcss/typography": "^0.5.20",
    "@tailwindcss/vite": "^4.3.2",
    "tailwindcss": "^4.3.2",
    "typescript": "^5.8.0"
  }
}

Line by line: mdx lets my posts mix components into markdown. rss and sitemap generate the feed and sitemap. fontsource self-hosts my font (no more Google Fonts slowing down first paint). The two @jdevalk packages are the SEO suite from Yoast’s founder (that’s part 7). astro is the framework. Dev side: type checking, Tailwind, and its typography plugin for styling post content.

No React. No UI framework at all. A blog is mostly HTML. Astro renders it at build time, and the few interactive bits (theme toggle, mobile menu) are small vanilla JavaScript.

Why Astro 7 was the right risk

Astro 7 was about three weeks old when we started, and my first instinct was to play it safe with 6. Here’s what changed my mind.

Astro 7’s headline change is a new Rust compiler that’s stricter: unclosed HTML tags are now build errors instead of silently accepted. That’s a real migration hazard for existing codebases. Old code full of sloppy markup breaks. But we were writing every file from scratch, so we’d just… write valid HTML from day one. The strictness only ever helped us.

The lesson generalizes: a “risky” upgrade is often only risky for code you already have. A clean slate is the cheapest possible time to be on the newest major version, because it means no forced migration six months later.

One real requirement to know about: Astro 7 needs Node 22.12 or newer. This matters again at deploy time (part 8).

The config, in TypeScript

Astro configs can be TypeScript files, which means typo-checking and autocomplete on your own config:

// astro.config.ts
import mdx from '@astrojs/mdx';
import sitemap from '@astrojs/sitemap';
import tailwindcss from '@tailwindcss/vite';
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';

export default defineConfig({
  site: 'https://jpshlk.com',
  prefetch: true,
  integrations: [mdx(), sitemap()],
  vite: {
    plugins: [tailwindcss()],
  },
});

Two things worth noticing. The site value is my canonical domain, and setting it forced me to fix a typo (jshlk.com) that had been quietly poisoning my old sitemap and canonical URLs. And Tailwind is now a Vite plugin, not an Astro integration, which brings me to the fun part.

Tailwind 4: the config file is gone

If you learned Tailwind before v4, you knew tailwind.config.js, a JavaScript file describing your colors, fonts, and plugins. Tailwind 4 deleted the whole concept. Configuration now lives in your CSS:

/* src/styles/global.css */
@import 'tailwindcss';
@plugin '@tailwindcss/typography';

@theme inline {
  --font-sans: 'Inter Variable', ui-sans-serif, system-ui, sans-serif;

  --color-primary-500: var(--color-sky-500);
  /* ...the full 50–950 primary scale... */
}

The @theme block replaces the old config: define a CSS variable, get utility classes for free. Declare --color-primary-500 and text-primary-500 just exists. It sounds like a small change, but it makes the design system feel like CSS instead of a JavaScript puzzle, which is exactly where part 4 picks up.

At this point the site built successfully and rendered one nearly-empty page. Felt amazing anyway. Every rebuild needs its “hello world” moment.

Next up: a tiny design system, and a dark mode toggle that finally works.

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

Don't Keep Your Git Repos in iCloud

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today my site’s repo found three completely different ways to ruin my afternoon. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice they were all the same bug wearing different hats.

The culprit: my code lived in ~/Documents, and ~/Documents syncs to iCloud.

If you keep git repos in iCloud Drive (or Dropbox, or Google Drive), this one’s for you. 🤙

Bug 1: my blog grew duplicate posts

First symptom: my blog list had posts showing up twice. Not a rendering bug, actual duplicates.

The cause was sitting in my repo:

src/content/blog/static-site-search-with-pagefind 2.mdx
src/content/blog/web-development-am-i-an-imposter 2.mdx
src/components/ProjectCard 2.astro

That 2 suffix is iCloud’s conflict resolution. When it thinks a file changed in two places, it doesn’t ask, it just quietly makes a copy with a number on the end. There were 21 of them, every single one byte-for-byte identical to its original.

My blog builds its post list by globbing src/content/blog/*.mdx. So Astro found pagefind.mdx and pagefind 2.mdx, and dutifully built both. iCloud invented content for my site.

Bug 2: git said I deleted my entire website

Next, git status told me I had deleted basically everything:

deleted:    src/content/blog/rebuilding-my-blog-with-ai.mdx
deleted:    astro.config.ts
deleted:    package.json
... 200 more

Except every one of those files was sitting right there on disk. I could open them.

Here’s what happened. Git keeps a file at .git/index that tracks everything in your repo (it’s what git add writes to, the staging area). Mine was gone. Deleted. In its place was a leftover .git/index.lock, the temporary file git writes to before swapping it into place.

So some git process had started writing a new index, and something killed it mid-write. Git compared “nothing in the index” against “202 files in the last commit” and concluded I’d nuked my site.

The fix was gentler than it looked, because the working files and the commit history were both fine:

rm -f .git/index.lock
git reset

git reset (no --hard, never --hard here) rebuilds the index from your last commit and touches nothing else. 202 files came right back. Nothing was ever actually lost.

Bug 3: fatal: mmap failed

Then git pull started doing this:

fatal: mmap failed: Operation timed out

This one is a great clue, because it rules things out. It’s not a network problem: a pull moments earlier had said “Already up to date,” so GitHub was reachable. mmap is memory-mapping, which is how git reads its bigger files by pointing at them on disk instead of loading them into memory. It’s a purely local file operation.

Git was trying to read a file on my own hard drive, and my own hard drive timed out.

One cause behind all three

Everything clicked when I ran brctl status, the command line tool for iCloud Drive:

Client Truth Unclean Items:
Under /Documents/GitHub/jpshlk-blog/.git/objects/49

There it is. iCloud was actively syncing the inside of my .git folder.

That’s all three bugs at once:

It made conflict copies of my posts (the 2 files).
It was writing to git’s internals while git was writing to them, which is how an index gets destroyed mid-write.
It had evicted some files to the cloud, replacing the local copy with a stub, so when git tried to mmap a file, macOS had to go download it first. That download stalled, and git got a timeout.

The realization that should have come to me hours earlier: git already is your sync. That’s the entire point of it. Layering iCloud on top isn’t belt and suspenders, it’s two systems fighting over the same files.

And .git is the worst possible thing to hand a file syncer. It’s thousands of tiny files that change constantly, get rewritten in place, and depend on exact timing (write a temp file, then atomically swap it in). iCloud sees churn and tries to helpfully sync every step. Git sees its files moving under it and falls over.

Cloud sync is built for documents you edit occasionally. A git repo is the opposite of that.

Getting out was worse than getting in

Fine, I thought. I’ll just move the folder out of ~/Documents. This took the rest of the afternoon.

Finder stalled. Dragging the folder did nothing, forever, because Finder waits on iCloud’s sync engine, and the sync engine was stuck.

cp stalled. It’s also silent, so you can’t tell if it’s working or hung. (Tip I wish I’d known sooner: press Ctrl-T during a running cp and it prints the file it’s on. It was fine, just grinding through node_modules.)

rsync got further, because it’s the better tool here: it can skip stuff (--exclude='node_modules') and it resumes where it left off if it dies. But it kept dying:

rsync: Bug-Daddy/launch-site/.git/HEAD: mmap: Operation canceled

Same mmap error, now on a .git/HEAD that iCloud would not cough up. I wrapped rsync in a retry loop and came back an hour later to find it still failing on the same file. (Bonus lesson: a until ... done loop swallows Ctrl-C, since each press only kills the current command and the loop starts the next one. Just close the terminal window.)

I checked “Optimize Mac Storage,” the setting that lets iCloud evict local files to save space. It was already off. iCloud was evicting my files anyway.

At that point I stopped trying to reason with it.

What actually worked

The answer was sitting there the whole time: GitHub already had a perfect copy of my repo.

I didn’t need to rescue those local files at all. I needed the repo, and the repo lives on GitHub. So:

git clone https://github.com/jpasholk/jpshlk-blog.git ~/Developer/GitHub/jpshlk-blog
cd ~/Developer/GitHub/jpshlk-blog
npm install

Ten seconds. A clean, complete, iCloud-free repo, and I was back to work.

That’s the quiet upside of pushing your work: when your local copy gets held hostage, you can just walk away from it. The only thing a fresh clone can’t recover is work you never committed, which is its own argument for committing more often.

Where repos belong

Anywhere that isn’t ~/Documents or ~/Desktop, since those are the two folders iCloud syncs. I moved mine to:

~/Developer

Apple gives that folder a little hammer icon and Xcode expects it, so it may as well be the standard. ~/code or ~/Projects work exactly as well. The only rule is to stay out of any folder a sync service is watching.

If you’re reading this from a repo in your Documents folder: it’s working right now, sure. It was working for me too, for months. Then one afternoon it made duplicate blog posts, deleted its own index, and refused to read its own files.

Move it. It takes ten seconds and it’ll save your afternoon.

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

Back Up Your Site With a Git Branch

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 2 of my rebuild series. Part 1 is the story of the whole project.

Step one of rebuilding my site from scratch was deleting almost everything in it. That’s terrifying. This post is about the one-command safety net that made it not terrifying.

”Isn’t git already a backup?”

Technically, yes. Git keeps the full history of every file, so nothing committed is ever really gone. But here’s the practical problem: once you delete files and pile new commits on top, finding the old stuff means digging through history with commands you have to look up every time.

A branch fixes that. A branch is just a named pointer to a specific moment in your repo’s history. Point one at your site as it exists today, and the entire old codebase stays one click away on GitHub. Forever, no digging.

The whole backup

git branch legacy-site origin/main
git push -u origin legacy-site

That’s it. The first line creates a branch called legacy-site pointing at the current state of main (the old site). The second pushes it to GitHub. Nothing about your live site changes; you’ve just planted a flag that says “the old site lives here.”

Now you can delete files on your working branch with total confidence.

Actually using the backup

Here’s the part I didn’t know before this project. You don’t have to switch branches to look at old code. git show can read any file from any branch directly:

git show legacy-site:src/components/BaseHead.astro

That prints the old BaseHead component to your terminal without touching your working files. During the rebuild we used this constantly. “What props did the old social icons take?” was one git show away, while the new code stayed untouched in the editor.

You can also just browse the branch on GitHub with the branch picker dropdown. Old site, fully intact, read-only.

Branches vs. tags (two-sentence version)

A tag is like a branch except it’s meant to never move: a permanent label like v1-legacy. A branch can accept new commits; a tag is a snapshot. For a backup, either works; I did both, because they’re free:

git tag v1-legacy origin/main
git push origin v1-legacy

The mindset shift

The real value here isn’t technical, it’s psychological. Every destructive step in the rebuild (deleting the layouts, the components, the old configs) felt fine, because “undo” was always available. If the rebuild had gone sideways I could have walked away with nothing lost.

If you’re about to do anything drastic to a project: branch first. It costs five seconds and buys unlimited courage. 💪

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

How I Rebuilt My Blog From Scratch With AI

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is part 1 of my rebuild series, where I document tearing this site down and rebuilding it from scratch.

If you’re reading this, you’re looking at a brand new website. Same posts, same me, but every single line of code under the hood was rewritten from scratch. And I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t write most of it. An AI did. I just told it what I wanted, made the decisions, and learned a ton along the way. 🤙

This post kicks off a series documenting the whole thing, in pieces simple enough that I could have followed them a couple years ago.

Why rebuild at all?

The old version of this site was a port of a popular theme, tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog, adapted to Astro. It served me well while I was learning, but it had problems:

It was somebody else’s design with my name on it.
It was stuck on Astro 3, several major versions behind.
The homepage was just a list of posts. I wanted a landing page (about me, my work, my hobbies) with the blog one click away.
The dark mode toggle was broken. (More on that in part 4. It was broken in a really educational way. 😜)

I also wanted serious SEO, and it turns out the founder of Yoast (the WordPress SEO plugin that runs half the internet) has been building SEO tools for Astro. That sealed it.

How the AI part actually worked

I used Claude Code, and the part that surprised me most wasn’t the code. It was the planning. Before touching anything, it:

Explored my repo and figured out how the old site worked, including things I’d forgotten about.
Researched the tools. It looked up the actual npm versions and discovered that the SEO package I wanted required Astro 6 or 7, which changed the whole plan.
Asked me real questions. Not “are you sure?” busywork; actual decisions: Netlify or Cloudflare? Keep the projects page or fold it into the landing page? And my favorite: “Your config says jshlk.com but your site title says jpshlk.com. Which one is right?” It found a typo in my canonical domain that had been sitting there the entire time.

Then it wrote a phased plan, and I pushed back on it. The first version was a “refactor.” I said no: complete rewrite, build the design system first, then the landing page, then bring the content over. It threw away the old plan and made a new one. That back-and-forth is the actual skill of working with AI, as far as I can tell: it does the labor, but you have to know what you want.

The plan we landed on

Six phases, each one a working checkpoint:

Back up the old site to a git branch (part 2)
Clean-slate scaffold: Astro 7, Tailwind CSS v4, TypeScript, no UI framework (part 3)
Design system: colors, type, components, and a dark mode that finally works (part 4)
Landing page: hero, about, work, hobbies (part 5)
Content migration: all my posts, without editing a single one (part 6)
SEO layer + launch: the Yoast founder’s toolkit, then launch day (parts 7 and 8)

Plus bonus parts on teaching the AI my writing voice (part 9) and the MCP servers that make AI dev tools way smarter (part 10).

The plan kept growing

Once the six phases were done, the site kept sprouting features, and each one turned into its own short post. Parts 11 through 17 are already written:

Every post gets its own share image (part 11)
A related posts section with no database (part 12)
The little reading time label (part 13)
A copy button on every code block (part 14)
Full posts in the RSS feed, not summaries (part 15)
A /uses page built by grepping my own posts (part 16)
Privacy-friendly analytics with GoatCounter (part 17)

And the rebuild doesn’t stop at launch. Five more parts are on the roadmap, each one a feature this site doesn’t have yet:

A /now page for what I’m into lately (part 18)
My RoutineHub shortcuts as first-class content here, not just links (part 19)
Static site search with Pagefind (part 20)
Comments (part 21). The old site ran Giscus, and I’m deciding between bringing it back or wiring comments to Bluesky or Mastodon replies instead. That decision is the post.
Generated share images, built per post at build time (part 22)

Build the thing, then write about the thing. That’s the whole model.

What I’d tell past me

You don’t need to be an expert to do this. You need to be able to read code well enough to sanity-check it, describe what you want clearly, and make decisions when asked. The AI handled Astro’s breaking changes, the Tailwind 4 migration, and a hundred details I’d have tripped on. I handled the taste, the priorities, and the “wait, that’s not what I meant.”

That division of labor felt fair. And I understand my own site far better than when it was a theme I’d ported and half-understood.

Next up: the five-minute git trick that made deleting my entire site feel safe.

Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🤙

I Guest-Host A Podcast About Shortcuts

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I started helping out with the RoutineHub Live Review Sessions Podcast sort of by accident a little while back. To make a long story short, I tuned into an episode and discovered they were discussing a Shortcut I created. I ended up joining the conversation and it went from there.

Now I try and help out with every episode I can. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope we are able to do them more often soon!

RoutineHub Live Review Sessions - Episode 5: Focusing On Simplicity

In this episode we cover some simple Shortcuts that are fun to use or perform a simple task quickly. The idea is to show something to people who aren’t into automation in general and make them go, “How did you do that?”

Show Notes

Here are the Shortcuts we reviewed, along with a few notes on how they work. We start with some very simple Shortcuts, and move on to others that are a bit more complicated, yet still conceptually easy to understand.

1. Speak Text

Sets Media Volume to 100%.
Asks for text as input, then has Siri Speak what you entered.

2. Sag Greg (Trombone)

Sets Media Volume at 100%.
Text action with a base64 string of the Sad Trombone Sound.
Decodes the base64.
Plays sound.

3. QR Wifi

Text action with your WIFI Name and Password in a specific string for QR codes.
Generate QR Code.
Show QR Code.

4. Calculate Tip

Asks for a number with the prompt “What is the bill amount?”
Choose from menu with tip percentages:
- 12%
- 15%
- 18%
- 20%
Then multiplies the bill by the the chosen percentage.
Shows an alert with the tip and the total.

5. Combine Photos

Select Photos.
Combines them horizontally or vertically.
Shows it in Quick Look.
I did add share sheet functionality to make it easier to use from the Photos app.

6. Grab Photo Link

Let’s you easily upload a photo to imgbb (requires an API key).
Generates a markdown link with optional placeholder and alt text.
Copies the link to your clipboard.

7. Shortcut Calculator

A complex-yet-simple Shortcut to calculate a lot of different things quickly and easily.
Some of the features are:
- Calculate An Expression
- Generate Random number
- Round Number
- Convert Time Zones
- Calculate Tip
- Calculate Interest
- Fractions To Deimals

8. Psswd - Protected Book

Create text-file-based notes that are password protected. (Text files are stored in iCloud)
Search or view notes.
Delete notes.

If you like this sort of thing and want to learn more, check out the RoutineHub Discord. There a lot of nice and helpful people who love talking about Shortcuts.

As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you check out this episode. If you enjoyed it let me know what you think in the comments below.

Have a good one, peace! 🤙

UI Actions Beta - First Impressions

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I saw this after signing up and browsing Mastodon this weekend, and it looks amazing for an early beta!

What Is Shortcuts And Why Should You Care?

Shortcuts was released in September 2018 as a part of iOS 12 after Apple purchased Workflow, which allowed users to create powerful automations by connecting different apps and services without needing to understand how to code.

Victor Sanchez has a great write-up on the history of Shortcuts on RoutineHub’s blog. It is a must-read, so go check that out!

In October of 2021, Apple finally brought Shortcuts to macOS with the release of Monterey. Shortcuts can sync over iCloud, allowing users to build Shortcuts on their Mac with a lot of crossover functionality.

While it is really good, when the UI doesn’t completely lag-out from scrolling through large Shortcuts, there are many things left to be desired.

Enter UI Actions - Control Mac Apps With Shortcuts

UI Actions is currently in beta and under active development, with version 0.9.1 being the latest release as of this writing. So far, I am very impressed with the potential of this project.

While I’ve only had the time to build a few Shortcuts using it, the experience has been quite good. The actions are intuitive and easy to understand, even for someone who may not be seasoned with automation.

I would hope that most people understand how to click File > Save or Edit > Paste.

The actions included are quite good and have the potential to automate a lot of tasks:

Get App Reference: References other apps for use in other actions.
Click Button: Tries to click a button by title.
Simulate Specific Key: Simulates pressing certain keys like Home, Escape, or Return with modifiers like Cmd, Opt, etc.
Simulate Typing: Simulates typing text on the keyboard, like the example in the gif above.
Get Menu Item Reference: Tries to find a UI menu item, and returns it as text like so: App Name: Menu Item Name.
Is Menu Item Enabled?: Returns a boolean value for the state of a menu item.
Select Menu Item: Tries to find a menu item and trigger it.
Select Menu Item Either/ Or: Useful for menu items that can change state.

Setting Up UI Actions

After installing you’ll need to go through setting up the proper permissions for UI Actions to work; this includes Allow Assitive Access and Allow Controlling The User Interface for obvious reasons.

Once you allow those permissions, it should be all set up and ready to go.

Download The Beta And Check Out The Forum

If this looks like something you’d like to try out, head over to ActionsDotWork to download the public beta, and check out the forum to learn more and report any bugs you find.

While you’re at it, give him a follow on Mastodon and take a look at some of his other projects as well!

As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you check out UI Actions. If you enjoyed reading about it let me know what you think in the comments below.

Have a good one, peace! 🤙

There's A New Scam In Town - And It's Very Sophisticated

Sun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I Saw This Today On Mastodon

Today on Mastodon, I came across a scarry new scam that cleverly manipulates both phone-based and digital banking safeguards. Remember, If you think your bank is calling you, always hang up and call back.

He Goes On To Mention Just How Sophisticated This Attack Is

Here’s how it works: You receive a phone call from someone claiming to be from your bank, alerting you to suspected fraudulent activity on your account.

This might immediately raise your suspicions as a potential scam, but then the caller offers to send you an in-app notification as proof of their legitimacy.

Some Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself

Verify Independently: Never trust caller ID or an incoming phone number. If you receive a call from someone claiming to be from your bank, hang up and call back using the official number from your bank’s website or your bank card.
Do Not Share Personal Information: During the call, do not share personal information or enter any details into your phone unless you have initiated the call and are certain of the recipient’s identity.
Be Wary of Pressure: Scammers often create a sense of urgency to prompt hasty decisions. Take your time and consult with someone you trust if you feel pressured.
Use Two-Factor Authentication: Enable two-factor authentication for your bank and other sensitive accounts, which adds an extra layer of security beyond just a username and password.
Employ Complex Passwords: Use a tool like Bitwarden’s free version to generate and manage complex passwords, adding another layer of security against unauthorized access.
Stay Informed: Keep up to date on the latest scam tactics. Banks often inform customers of common fraud techniques through their websites or emails.

Staying Safe Means Being Smart - And It Takes Work

There you have it—a glimpse into the crafty world of modern scams that may hit closer to home than we’d like!

Keeping our digital lives secure isn’t just smart; it’s necessary. Remember, it’s all about staying vigilant, using strong passwords with tools like Bitwarden, and keeping informed. Let’s keep our online environments safe and scam-free.

Spread the word, stay curious, and as always, make your digital footprint a secure one!

Update From Terence

Terence also did a great write up on his site. Head on over and give his post a read.

Here is the original Reddit post:

Been scammed over £18,000 through my Chase account which is an extremely significant amount, around two years of savings. byu/Captain_Levi_00 inUKPersonalFinance

As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you take this stuff seriously. If you enjoyed reading about it let me know what you think in the comments below.

Have a good one, peace! 🤙

Setapp - Powerful Apps For Powerful Workflows

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I finally checked out Setapp, and I don’t know what I was waiting for.

Dozens Of Powerful Apps Under One Subscription

Subscriptions have become a bad word in recent times—and for good reason. From streaming your favorite movies and TV shows to online gaming; hell, there are even food deliveries services for both you and your pets, it seems there’s a subscription for everything. But what about for software?

Enter Setapp, a subscription service that promises to simplify your digital life without cluttering it with unnecessary expenses.

Whether you are a power user or a casual, Setapp is worth at least checking out. It couldn’t hurt with a free 7-day trial.

Is The Value Proposition Worth It?

Before you shy away from the ten-dollar-per-month cost, I’ll walk you through what I’ve calculated so far.

I have installed a total of ten apps within the few weeks that I’ve been testing Setapp, some of which don’t have free trials on their own. The total cost of purchasing or subscribing to these would be almost $190 US. So, $9.99 per month starts to sound pretty good when you do the math.

Now, I’ll admit the value proposition does get a bit more tricky to work out the longer you are subscribed. A few of those apps are subscription-only, or the one-time purchase only guarantees one year of updates.

This is also only taking into account the fact that I’ve barely scratched the surface of their impressive collection. I’m sure that I likely won’t ever use even a quarter of the apps that they offer, but it is nice to have a curated selection to choose from when needed.

Here’s A Quick Breakdown Of The Apps, The Cost, And Some Notes:

I’m not going to add up the cost of all ten apps, but here are my favorites that I use multiple times daily at work and when working on my own personal projects.

Bartender 5 - $16:

4 week trial
Bartender 4 was released in April of 2021 for $15.
Upgrade from 4 for 50% off.

CleanShot X - $29:

Adds a ton of screenshot features over macOs’s built-in functionality.

30-day money back guarantee.
One year of updates, optionally renew at $19 annually for updates.
$10 per month, or $8 per month if paying for a year.
Comes with cloud storage, and a custom domain if that’s your thing!

PixelSnap 2 - $39:

A tiny app that will accurately measure anything on your screen, within any app.

No trial, 30-day money back guarentee.
Discounts on multiple licenses.
Integrates with CleanShot X!

Sip - $20:

Another tiny app that lets you grab color values from anything on your screen.

1 year of updates.
50% off on licence exension.
Can grab more than just hex values, and organize color pallets.

iStatMenus 6 - $11.99:

No trial, Mac App Store (Feature Limited).
$9.99 to upgrade.
Tons of features I’ve yet to explore.

All of those apps are a cup of coffee away from totaling what it costs to pay for Setapp for a year. If you use your Mac like I do, and you don’t see value there then I’m not sure what to tell you.

Some Final Thoughts

Setapp certainly offers a strong value for designers, developers, or power users, or anyone who wants to get the most out of their Mac. Adding yet another subscription is always a difficult choice, but once you take a look at a few of the apps it offers, it starts to pencil out quickly.

At the end of the day, there’s no risk to try the 7-day trial. You may find that there are apps you didn’t know you needed. So go ahead and check it out by tapping the badge below—what could it hurt?

Full disclosure: I recently joined the Setapp Affiliate Program, so if you join through my link, I’ll get a kickback.

Still Thinking About It?

Check out this post on Reddit where /u/jkazz18 breaks it down pretty well and even provides a handy calculator spreadsheet to see if it’s worth it!

Based on a quick scan, my total savings in the first year would be over 300 dollars!

Is Set App Worth It?, posted by u/jkazz18 in r/macapps.

As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you check out Setapp. If you enjoyed reading about it let me know what you think in the comments below.

Have a good one, peace! 🤙

Darksun - A Dark Sky-Inspired Weather App

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Last weekend, I saw a post on the Apple subreddit about a new weather app that immediately piqued my interest.

An Homage To The Former Weather King

The developer, Kostas Mavropalias, sums it up best in his own words:

TL;DR: I loved Dark Sky’s UI, features, and no-subscription model. I built Darksun Weather as an homage to what made Dark Sky great, bringing in new ideas and modern features, while keeping it free (sorry, no weather alerts & radar!), without ads/tracking/data collection/subscription.

The fact that it is free with zero ads or data collection is really nice, although that comes at the expense of a less feature-rich app, which makes sense. Anyone who expects premium features should expect to pay a premium price.

Weather At A Glance

In the Reddit post, he mentions that he aims to make weather data useful for daily life. The idea is to allow users to glance at the app for a few seconds and understand the current weather. After using it for a few days, I think he’s mostly achieved that.

The only thing that’s holding it back is some of the icon choices, and the UI being a combination of “dumbed down and detailed,” as mentioned by a commenter.

This is definitely some good feedback and I hope the developer considers adding more complexity to rain data.

Minimal Settings With Helpful Tips

Darksun stands out for its minimalist approach, particularly in the settings department, which aligns with its goal of simplicity and ease of use. The app smartly introduces users to its interface through helpful alerts and guides, easing them into the UI without overwhelming them with options.

You can access these anytime after dismissing them by tapping the question mark at the top left of the app in case you need a reminder of what certain UI elements mean.

This approach not only streamlines the user experience but also subtly educates on how to interpret the nuanced weather data presented.

Dark Mode Needs A Little Work

One feature that needs some polish is the dark mode implementation. It’s not obvious on how to toggle it on or off, and it doesn’t inherit the user’s preference set by iOS. To toggle dark mode you tap the anywhere right under the navigation bar, which is a little unintuitive.

While not a deal-breaker, I hope that he at least adds in a system dark mode, it shouldn’t be more than a half a dozen or so lines of code.

Powered By Open-Source Data

To keep Darksun free, he is using a few open-source data providers.

Open-Mateo and MET Norway: Both of which look like really awesome weather services that provide data for free.
- Open-Meteo
- MET Norway:
OpenStreetMap’s Weather API: Who provides a free API to access weather data with a limit of 1000 API calls per day.
- OpenWeather

It would be interesting to see how he keeps that OpenWeather load under the limit.

Hinting At More Features

He later suggests that a private version of Darksun, currently available only to friends and family, incorporates Apple’s Weather API, offering minute-by-minute precipitation alerts.

He indicates the possibility of making this version publicly available in the future, potentially with a subscription fee to offset operational costs. I personally hope there is sufficient interest to encourage him to proceed with this plan, and will support him one hundred percent.

Free Forever With Optional In-app Purchases Or Subscriptions

In keeping with the principles of open-source development, the creator of Darksun is committed to keeping the core application free for all users. This ensures that everyone can access reliable weather forecasts without financial barriers.

However, to accommodate the needs of users who desire more detailed information and advanced features, Darksun will have optional in-app purchases. Additionally, for those who require even more robust weather data, premium sources would be accessed through subscriptions.

These options are designed not only to cater to varying user preferences but also to support the ongoing development and improvement of the app, balancing accessibility with advanced capabilities.

Only Time Will Tell If Darksun Can Weather The Future

The app is still very new, but it looks like there are good things in store if he remains committed.

Dark Sky’s shadow is quite large and difficult to shine through, but perhaps it will stand the test of time and gain enough popularity for him to justify devoting the time and resources it would take to become a worthy successor.

Download Darksun On The App Store

If you’re looking for an alternative to the Apple Weather app, go ahead and tap the badge to download Darksun on the App Store, and be sure to check out the app’s website as well!

Thanks For Reading!

As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you check out this app. If you enjoyed reading about it let me know what you think in the comments below.

Have a good one, peace! 🤙

Ice - A MacOS Menu Bar Manager

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Follow @jordanbaird Star Issue

Meet Ice, an open-source menu bar manager that offers robust features and customization options tailored for MacOS users. Designed with both simplicity and functionality in mind, Ice allows you to declutter your desktop and access your most-used applications and services with ease.

Whether you’re a power user or just looking for a more organized workspace, Ice introduces an elegant solution to enhance your daily computing tasks.

Installing Ice By Jordan Baird From GitHub

To install Ice, head on over to the GitHub repo linked above and grab the latest release, which is 0.8.0 as of this post.

In case you’ve never installed anything from GitHub before:

Click on the zip file under the Assets heading and it will prompt you to allow downloads from objects.githubusercontent.com. Click “Allow”.
After the file is downloaded, double-click to unzip the file and move it to your Applications folder.
Then launch Ice by clicking on the icon in your Applications folder or with Spotlight.
Ice will open and you’ll see a screen like the below screenshot.

Ice’s Features And Functionality

Ice’s general settings reveal a user-friendly approach to MacOS menu bar management. It offers customizable visibility options like ‘Show on click’, ‘Show on hover’, and ‘Show on scroll’, along with ‘Automatically rehide’ to keep the desktop uncluttered.

Launch at login: This setting should be enabled at all times, what would be the point of having to enable it every time?

Show Ice icon: Same as above, it’s nice to see an icon that indicates that Ice is actively hiding your icons.

Ice icon: Ice provides some nice icons to choose from and also allows you to use your own, which is very nice.

Show on click & Show on hover: I have both of these enabled in case Ice doesn’t recognize me hovering fast enough. It enables you to click to hide them as well.

Show on scroll: This one is nice as well, you swipe with two fingers to show or hide icons.

Automatically rehide: For now I have this one on as well, just in case I forget to swipe or click to hide everything.

Strategy: This feature employs a ‘smart algorithm’ to organize menu bar items efficiently. I have only been using it since this morning so I’m not really sure how it works in practice.

This suite of features positions Ice as an intuitive tool designed to enhance user experience through simplicity and smart design.

I will be putting it through its paces and likely reporting some bugs I’ve already experienced, but so far, this seems like a great free alternative to Bartender $(16.00), at least for minimal functionality.

You can also get Bartender as part of SetApp, which is an awesome subscription service to get a bunch of different apps for once price.

Thanks for stopping by! I’d love to hear your experiences with Ice or any questions you might have — drop a comment below!

Scroll Reverser - A Tiny Mac App To Manage How Scrolling Works

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

There’s Literally Zero Reason Why This Isn’t A Native Feature

There are a lot of things that Apple gets right, and a lot of them are under-the-hood so to speak. However, occasionally there are some things that make me scratch my head. I ran into a little problem when I wanted to use a Mouse and the Magic Trackpad in tandem, but have the scrolling set differently per device.

I want to be able to have the Trackpad settings similar to how an iPhone or iPad work, where I push with two fingers up and it scrolls up, and pull down to scroll down. Then for the mouse, I want it to scroll normally, like a sane person…

Enter Scroll Reverser By Nick Moore

This tiny app completely solves this edge-case issue. You can download it from the link above, or check out the GitHub repo.

The settings are minimal and self-explanatory. Check it out and give it a star if you’d like!

Star

I Dug Up An Old Jailbreak Podcast Episode With Siguza And tihmstar

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I used to run a podcast way back in the day called Jailcast. It was a lot of fun and I got the pleasure of chatting with a lot of very talented people in the community.

My favorite episode was the one where I interviewed two jailbreak developers who created The Phoenix Jailbreak, a semi-untethered jailbreak for iOS 9.3.5-9.3.6.

In the episode I interviewed Siguza and tihmstar and asked questions from the community.

Enjoy!

Odd Behavior With Transitions

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

What’s with the glitchy transitions?

After forking this awesome theme from here, then throwing it at Netlify, I noticed some odd issues with the animation for page transitions. Sometimes the site would glitch out when clicking through to another page.

After looking into it a bit I posted about it in the Astro Discord, and someone mentioned that there isn’t a <ViewTransitions /> tag in the <head> of the site, as per Astro’s Docs. That seemed to make sense, so I started looking through the repo code and noticed that there actually isn’t a <head> tag anywhere to be found. This is incredibly odd because the generated HTML definitely contains a <head>. 🤨

I know that I am super new to Astro and still learning when it comes to web development, but I know that the <head> tag is coming from somewhere… My best guess is that either there’s something I don’t know about how Astro generates the markup, or that if you happen to throw meta tags at a browser it will try and wrap them in a head tag anyway.

After some more troubleshooting, I noticed that certain pages weren’t affected by the glitch…

Looks like images may be the problem.

Wait… How come this post didn’t do that then?

I put that image in the public folder instead of the src/assets.

My guess is it’s something to do with <ViewTransitions />, and how Astro imports the image in src.

Reporting the bug

I reported as an issue here:

Describe the bug

Okay, this is a wierd one…

After forking the theme and starting to add my own content I noticed some odd behavior. When clicking on a link to a post or page that has an image in it the transition animations glitch out, causing the page to flicker in Safari and the mobile nav to fly by. In Chrome it doesn’t flash, just does the nav thing…

To Reproduce

Fork the theme.

Add a new page with an image in src, in my case src/assets,

Then either build it through Netlify or run npm run build, then run npm run preview.

Click a link to one of those pages.

It should glitch like I described.

Expected behavior

Images should be able to be put in src so Astro can process them with the <Image /> component.

Screenshots

Desktop (please complete the following information):

OS: MacOS - Ventura 13.5

Browser: Safari - 16.6 (18615.3.12.11.2), Chrome - 119.0.6045.159

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

Device: iPhone 13 Pro Max

OS: iOS 17.2

Browser Safari - 17

Additional context

I documented this for my ongoing journey about learning webdev as a complete noob here.

Also, I couldn’t find the <head> to check if the <ViewTransitions /> component was in there. I found it under the html tag in RootLayout though. I thought it was supposed to go in the head, per the Astro Docs. Any insight on this?

Thanks again for the awesome theme and for fixing the last issue I reported!

I hope he has some time to check it out soon, because I’m kinda stumped on how to proceed.

If I add another <head> tag to the BaseHead component would it produce two different heads and then mess things up? 🤔

Update

What I ended up having to do was wrapping the <head> tag around both <ViewTransitions /> and <BaseHead ?> and then everything worked, like this:

<head>
<ViewTransitions />
<BaseHead title={title} description={description}/>
<head/>

If I didn’t include the <BaseHead /> component, then the layout didn’t work right on mobile. For some reason, it zoomed the page out and the content shank down to about 60% of the window. Now I can proceed to move my images to src then Astro can properly process them with the <Image /> component.

Another Update

He fixed it with this commit here.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps. I’ll definetly let this post stay up as part of my journey relearning web development.

Peace! ✌️

OpenAI Staff Alarmed by Q*

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

What does it mean when an AI can do math?

The Guardian reported how “OpenAI ‘was working on an advanced model so powerful it alarmed staff’” yesterday.

A lot of people don’t know what these ‘AI’ tools even are, let alone how potentially dangerous they could be. In a comment in this Reddit thread, Literature-South breaks it down pretty well:

Comment byu/jchacakan from discussion innews

Learning Astro

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’ll be slowly updating this post with notes about my initial experience with Astro.

Following this tutorial

https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/

Notes

Astro puts files in the /public directory into the root for some reason.

Markdown Guide

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Markdown and Mdx parsing is supported via unified, and other remark and rehype packages. next-mdx-remote allows us to parse .mdx and .md files in a more flexible manner without touching webpack.

GitHub flavored markdown is used. mdx-prism provides syntax highlighting capabilities for code blocks. Here’s a demo of how everything looks.

The following markdown cheatsheet is adapted from: https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *.

Syntax guide

Here’s an overview of Markdown syntax that you can use anywhere on GitHub.com or in your own text files.

Headers

# This is a h1 tag

## This is a h2 tag

#### This is a h4 tag

This is a h1 tag

This is a h2 tag

This is a h4 tag

Emphasis

_This text will be italic_

**This text will be bold**

_You **can** combine them_

This text will be italic

This text will be bold

You can combine them

Lists

Unordered

- Item 1
- Item 2
  - Item 2a
  - Item 2b

Item 1
Item 2
- Item 2a
- Item 2b

Ordered

1. Item 1
1. Item 2
1. Item 3
   1. Item 3a
   1. Item 3b

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
1. Item 3a
2. Item 3b

Images

![GitHub Logo](https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/logos_page/GitHub-Mark.png)
Format: ![Alt Text](url)

Links

http://github.com - automatic!
[GitHub](http://github.com)

http://github.com - automatic! GitHub

Blockquotes

As Kanye West said:

> We're living the future so
> the present is our past.

As Kanye West said:

We’re living the future so the present is our past.

Inline code

I think you should use an
`<addr>` element here instead.

I think you should use an <addr> element here instead.

Syntax highlighting

Here’s an example of how you can use syntax highlighting with GitHub Flavored Markdown:

```js
function fancyAlert(arg) {
  if (arg) {
    $.facebox({ div: '#foo' })
  }
}
```

And here’s how it looks - nicely colored!

function fancyAlert(arg) {
  if (arg) {
    $.facebox({ div: '#foo' })
  }
}

Footnotes

Here is a simple footnote[^1]. With some additional text after it.

[^1]: My reference.

Here is a simple footnote¹. With some additional text after it.

Task Lists

- [x] list syntax required (any unordered or ordered list supported)
- [x] this is a complete item
- [ ] this is an incomplete item

list syntax required (any unordered or ordered list supported)
this is a complete item
this is an incomplete item

Tables

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens - (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe |:

| First Header                | Second Header                |
| --------------------------- | ---------------------------- |
| Content from cell 1         | Content from cell 2          |
| Content in the first column | Content in the second column |

First Header	Second Header
Content from cell 1	Content from cell 2
Content in the first column	Content in the second column

Strikethrough

Any word wrapped with two tildes (like ~~this~~) will appear ~~crossed out~~.

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Tags Archive in Liquid on a GitHub Pages Jekyll Site

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

What is a blog without tags and an archive page?

When I started on this site, I wasn’t looking forward to figuring out tags logic and building the archive page to show them. I had tried using other Jekyll themes, and sometimes their tags would work and sometimes they wouldn’t.

Because everyone has a different way of doing things, sometimes it’s hard to follow the logic of why things work and why they don’t. It took me sitting down and watching a lynda.com video series on Jekyll to understand how tags worked. At least enough to implement a simple archive page sorted by tags. I still have a lot to learn about Jekyll, but this is how I achieved my tags archive.

Something worth noting is that James Williamson, the author of the video series I watched, mentioned a blog post by Michael Lanyon about alphabetizing Jekyll page tags in pure Liquid. Give it a read if you have a few minutes, you won’t be disappointed.

From what I learned, you need four things to get tags working on a Jekyll site:

A tags array in at least one post’s front matter.
Some code to capture and sort those tags.
Other code to loop through them and print them to the page.
An archive page to display them.

{% capture site_tags %}
  {% for tag in site.tags %}
    {{ tag | first }}{% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}
{% endcapture %}

{% assign sortedTags=site_tags | split:',' | sort %}

{% for tag in sortedTags %}
  <span class="tags">
    <a href="#{{tag | cgi_escape}}">{{ tag }} [{{ site.tags[tag].size }}]</a>
    {% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}
  </span>
{% endfor %}

Jekyll will store all the tags you specify in the front matter of your posts in the site.tags object. Any time you add a new tag to a post, they will be added automatically upon rebuilding the site, this is super useful for creating the tag page, although it’s not very straightforward.

In the code above, the first part will create a variable called site_tags using capture. It will then loop through the tags object and grab the name of each tag and assign it as a variable called tag. Since each tag in the tags object has two properties, a name and a list of posts, it does this by using the first filter which grabs the first property. It then creates a new array called sortedTags which takes the names from site_tags and alphabetizes them and splits them up with a comma, unless it’s the last entry, then it leaves the comma off.

The second will loop through the array sortedTags and prints the tag name along with the number of posts associated with it. It seems pretty complicated, but once you work it out, it’s not that bad.

Creating the archive page

{% for tag in sortedTags %}
<div>
  <h3 id="{{tag | cgi_escape}}" class="tag-name"><span>{{tag}}</span></h3>
    <ul class="tag-list">
    {% for post in site.tags[tag] %}
      <li>
        <time itemprop="dateCreated" datetime="{{post.date}}">{{post.date | date: "%b %d, %Y "}}</time> <a href="{{site.baseurl}}{{post.url}}" rel="bookmark" title="Link to {{site.baseurl}}{{post.url}}">{{post.title}}</a>
      </li>
    {% endfor %}
    </ul>
  </div>
{% endfor %}

Now I need to loop through the sortedTags array to display our tags in the archive page, and then loop through the posts associated with each tag. I’ll use another forloop, with another forloop nested inside, this will create a list of tags with a list of posts under each one.

In the code example above, the first loop prints the name each of the tags in a header, while the second loops through the posts for each tag and prints the date and then the title with a link. Again, it’s not the most natural thing to wrap your head around at first. The great thing about Jekyll is it sort of lets you tiptoe into programming concepts without being bogged down with semantics.

{% for tag in post.tags %}
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/archive/index.html#{{ tag | cgi_escape }}" title="Pages tagged {{ tag }}" rel="tag">{{ tag }}</a>{% unless forloop.last %}, {% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

Creating the tag cloud for each post is a bit trickier, you can’t use the same logic as the tag cloud on the archive page. It has only to display the tags that are in the post it’s shown on. I can’t loop through sortedTags because it will just give me the same global sorted tag list.

To access the post tags, I’ll need to use post.tags and loop through that. Also, the href value has to be relative to jump to the archive page and then land on the right section.

Another thing to mention is the cgi_escape filter you may have seen. It strips the spaces out of the tag and replaces it with a dash, this is, so the URL’s of the website still work in all circumstances.

Thanks for stopping in!

I hope you like this post!

I will try and get a post out about once a week or so about my process of building this site and eventually turning it into a theme. There is a lot more to cover so stay tuned for more updates!

Hiking Horn Canyon Trail to The Pines

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

There’s nothing quite like a hike up Horn Canyon in Ojai, California. You have to weave through Thatcher School to find the trailhead, but it’s not hard just stay to the right.

Horn Canyon Trail

Accessible behind Thatcher school in Ojai California, Horn Canyon Trail is a really nice moderate hike in the east end of the valley.

It starts out with a gradual increase in slope and difficulty, but eventually becomes an incredibly difficult hike later on.

It shouldn’t be tackled by people who aren’t in shape.

Horn Canyon Trailhead

The trail is muddy and torn apart in places from the recent rains and people with horses. It’s not too bad though, you can easily walk around the mud with a little care.

Coming to the first river crossing

The first river crossing is completely dry. Last time I was here the creek was spilling over those rocks. California seems to be showing it’s true desert colors now. It had been raining a decent amount this winter though.

Taking a little break before the going gets tough

We took a little break at the last river crossing. There are two streams that converge here so usually it’s a nice and cool spot to rest. We saw a few groups of people come down the trail at this point.

The steep, long haul

This is the start of the rather steep incline to The Pines campground. After this long uphill tunnel you start the switchbacks, which continue almost all the way up to the camp.

Further and further up the ridge

After the switchbacks the trail winds up the canyon before turning back and heading up a ridge. This doesn’t look as steep as it is, but it’s a good hike for working out your glutes!

Rewarding views from behind motivate us to push on

At this high up we’re able to just start seeing the ocean, a rewarding part of such a steep hike. Ojai will always be beautiful from this vantage.

Watch out for ticks in thick brush like this

This is the last section of the hike to The Pines. At this point most of the elevation has been tackled by the switchbacks so this isn’t as steep.

Notice the plant on the left, called chamise, it can help with erosion and does well where other plants wouldn’t. A friend of mine claims that ticks love the stuff, especially after a rain. Suffice it to say I’ll avoid touching it as much as I can in the future.

Finally, we made it to the campground

Here is The Pines campground itself. All but a half dozen or so of the pine trees are felled due to the severity of the drought. The spring is dry, which is a bummer because it’s nice to be able to fill up water bottles there.

Taking a break and refueling before the hiking down

We kicked back at the little side camp to catch our breath and behold the loss of the trees. With huge rounds all over and tall piles of dead branches, the place looks like a graveyard. Truly a sad sight indeed.

Thanks for following my hike!

Hiking to Gridley Springs Camp, above Ojai California

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This is a very nice hiking trail that is very popular among the locals of Ojai California. With a nice gradual slope up the canyon, you have a chance to warm up before it gets steep.

Gridley Trail to Gridley Springs Camp

Gridley trail meets up with several other trails and eventually will take you up to the ranger tower on Nordhoff Peak.

Gridley Trail Entrance

Gridley Trail starts at the top of Gridley Road and meets up with Nordhoff Ridge Road. It’s a nice gentle incline and never too steep of a hike. It’s really nice and lends itself to the trails popularity among locals in Ojai.

Iconic Rocky Steps of Gridley Trail

These rock steps are iconic of Gridley Trail. It’s hard to imagine riding down them on a mountain bike but people do it almost everyday. I’ll stick to my good old hiking boots, thank you.

Picnic spot with a view

A view of Ojai from just a bit up the trail from the rock steps. Right behind is a nice boulder (not pictured) that’s good for having a little picnic with a view.

Looking up Gridley Canyon

A look up the long canyon toward Nordhoff Ridge. The ranger tower is up on that ridge just to the left behind the hillside.

Then looking down at beautiful Ojai California

View from a little higher up the trail, Ojai never ceases to amaze me with how beautiful it is from above.

Yucca seed pod

We saw several Yucca plants that had gone to seed along the trail. These pods can carry hundreds of seeds, they are really light so they can drift long distances in the wind.

Taking a break on a boulder halfway up a mountain

A little break on a boulder next to the trail. It seems every time I hike this trail I stop here.

Stopped to check out some small mushrooms

Mushrooms all over the trail! Everything was still dewy in the shade of the hillsides from the rain the day before.

I spotted a decent size puffball mushroom (Calbovista subsculpta). It’s actually edible and tasty if the inside is still white. As it matures the inside will turn dark brown and powdery due to the spores developing.

Fromk Wikipedia

Many mushrooms are poisonous some are deadly poisonous, and the responsibility for eating any mushroom or fungus must rest with the individual. Never eat any wild mushroom if you are not absolutely sure it is edible. Consider also there are people who are allergic to all species of mushrooms. Even when you know a mushroom well weather conditions or animal damage can cause differences in appearance that could lead to misidentification.

The Ojai fritillary Flower

Ojai fritillary (Fritillaria ojaiensis) sprouting up after a day of rain. It is a rare and endangered native plant that only grows in a few regions of California.

From Calflora:

Fritillaria ojaiensis, a monocot, is a perennial herb (bulb) that is native to California and is endemic (limited) to California.

Gridley Springs horse trough

After a bit more hiking we arrive at Gridley Springs Camp, a tiny little camp right off the side of the trail.

A sign of the drought in California

A sad sight indeed, I remember when this was overflowing with water all year around. This should serve as a reminder of the seriousness of the drought Southern California is in.

Finally to Gridley Springs Camp!

Here is a shot of the camp itself, in all it’s glory. Somebody seems to have taken out the fire pit and removed the steel ring that used to be up here.

My best guess would be it’s due to the fire restrictions that come with the drought.

It’s a small camp if it can be called a camp at all, it’s more of a stop-off spot to grab a quick meal before continuing on to the ridge.

Thanks for following my hike!

Please feel free to comment if you’d like. Also, be sure to check out HikeLosPadres.com for more information on the hikes that I go on or others if you’re interested in learning more about the wonderful natural world that surrounds you.

Hiking Fox Canyon In Ojai, Ca

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

A great little hike that forks off of Shelf Road (Valley View Trail). Its a little bit under 2 miles and a little steep at times with quite a few switchbacks.

Fox Canyon Trail in Ojai, California

Overall it’s a hike that will make you sweat but shouldn’t take all day. You should still pack your hiking hat.

Looking down on the town of Ojai

You are awarded with views like this as you stop to take a breath. Ojai truly is a beautiful place.

That little red thing is the roof of a house that sits right off of Shelf Road.

Fox Canyon Trail connects to Pratt Trail

From here the trail splits in two and connects over to Pratt Trail, which is another way to get here.

Green bark Cianothus

The price of the trail being carved into the hillside for all of us to enjoy. A green bark ceanothus tree just happened to be growing in the way of the trail…

It’s quite beautiful to see the color of it’s wood-flesh.

A look back toward Fox Canyon

This is about where we met up with Luci’s Trail. This is looking back toward Fox Canyon.

Fork in the road

A sign for Foothill Trail, right to Luci’s Trail, or go straight on to Fuel Break Road which leads over to Gridley Trail.

Luci’s rocky trail

Going down Luci’s Trail is a little rough, it can be touch and go if you’re not careful.

Phacelia, a plant that can actually cause a poison-oak like rash

Here is my buddy James showing me a plant to avoid called phacelia.

Closer picture of phacelia.

From Wikipedia:

As with many species in the Boraginaceae, contact with the hairs of some species of Phacelia can cause a very unpleasant rash similar to that from poison oak and poison ivy in sensitive individuals. The major contact allergen of Phacelia crenulata has been identified as geranylhydroquinone. The similar-appearing species Eriodictyon parryi (poodle-dog bush), a common chaparral plant of Southern California, is also a frequent cause of skin irritation.

Native grass sptouting up

Here is a plant that you don’t have to avoid, just because.

Checking out our route

Here is a view of Fox Canyon Trail from Luci’s Trail.

Steep little Switchbacks

Some very steep and tiny switchbacks. What are these? Switchbacks for ants?

Awesome old water tank

Luci’s Trail winds by an interesting old steel drum of some kind. I assume it used to hold water maybe?

Living in Alaska for a Spell

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

After being back in my home town for a while following my Montana trip, I was still looking for my next move. While I was picking up work here and there, it wasn’t enough to save anything and get ahead.

Why Alaska?

I was beginning to think Southern California wasn’t for me anymore.

That is around the time a friend of mine gave me a call from Alaska. He had left for a job in Healy around when I left for Montana. It turns out that someone was leaving the job early for personal reasons and they needed to fill the position asap.

It being literally in the middle of Alaska positions are a little difficult to fill.

Flying to to the top of the world

This was by far the longest flight I’d ever been on. We had a layover in Seattle for about an hour. From Seattle the plane took off into the sunset.

During the flight it never actually got dark, the sun would dip behind the horizon and then pop back up again a few minutes later.

Denali State Park

The job was working for a private company that runs lodges in Denali National Park.

Sunset in Healy, Alaska

Healy is beautiful if you look in the right places. Other than that, it’s really just a hole in the wall on the side of the road.

I could tell right away that this place wasn’t for me.

Luckily, my Mom has a good friend in Anchorage, she was excited at the prospect of me coming to stay for a few months.

I packed up my things and headed south.

Kincaid park disc golf course, hole eighteen

One of the first things I did was search out local disc golf courses. There were a few to choose from so I was able to find a really good one at Kincaid Park.

Other than the crazy insects that swarm you it was a really nice place to play.

Kincaid park meadow

Kincaid park has over fifteen hundred acres of land accessible to the public. There are a lot of hiking/ cross country skiing trails to check out.

Matanuska Glacier is the largest that is accessible by car in the US

We decided it would be a good idea to take a drive up north a bit and check out a glacier. It was quite a drive but worth it in the end.

Me on top of the glacier, this is as far as I’d go without equipment.

Having a beer with the pack

When I wasn’t working obscene hours at Costco, visiting glaciers or playing disc golf, I could generally be found hanging out with my neighbors on the front lawn drinking beers with the dog pack.

All in all it was a really nice time. Imbibe responsibly peeps!

Thanks again Karen! ;P

At the shooting range

William, my roommates son took me shooting the day before I left. Not a bad way to spend my last hours in Alaska I’d say.

There is something about holding a semi-automatic shotgun that you can’t describe in words.

All packed up and ready

After deciding that Alaska ultimately wasn’t for me I arranged a flight to meet a buddy in Idaho. From there we’d road trip back to Southern California.

Pit stop in Boise, Idaho before heading home

The first thing I did when I finished settling into my hotel room on the first night was look for a place throw some discs.

Along the way to Ann Morrison park the trail snakes along the river.

Fall was in full swing in Boise. This was along the ‘Greenbelt’, which cuts through the middle of the city with lush greenery and the winding Boise river.

As luck would have it, there was a disc golf course at the place I decided to go. I actually didn’t search for courses, just opened Google Maps and found the closes green area and went there.

I think it was meant to be.

One of the last things I did while there was check out the University campus. It’s right off of the Greenbelt so it wasn’t far out of our way.

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

Thank you for reading!

A Hobbit House on a Montana Homestead

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Why Montana?

Permaculture.

WTF is that?

I don’t want to spend time and energy going into what it is, I’ll leave that to the thousands of others. For the sake of my answer, it is what led me to the podcast of a man named, Paul Wheaton.

He runs a website called permies, which is the largest permaculture forum on the web. He is known as the ‘bad boy’ of permaculture, with a lot of people not regarding him kindly.

Anyway, his podcast is where I started learning about the homesteading side of permaculture. Eventually, Paul bought some land outside of Missoula Montana and invited like-minded permies out to play.

After following his stuff for a while I arrived there about midway through year three. I had went through a divorce a year earlier and was ready for something new.

Arriving at the homestead

After a very long and tiring drive, I was finally here! The fabled things from the permies website and Paul’s podcast were in front of my eyes.

The solar contraption you see on the right in there has been dubbed, “The Voltzwagon”. It is what supplies 100% of the power to the ‘WOFATI’ that’s under that mound of dirt. It is also movable if needed on other parts of the property.

Home, sweet Hobbit home

The interior was pretty dirty from the floor being unfinished and people coming and going all day. I am not unaccustomed to rough living so it didn’t really faze me.

The wood stove-looking thing is a modified rocket mass heater. It was modified to fix a flaw that didn’t allow it to achieve an efficient burn.

Morning coffee next to the Rocket Mass Heater

Nothing like coffee next to a rocket mass heater to kick off the morning.

Checking our the area the next morning

Exploring the area a bit more after having coffee. This is on the trail to the neighbors lease. (Still on Paul’s 200 acres.)

Okay it’s not quite a Hobbit house, but it’s close

Alright, you wont find Merry and Pippin smoking their pipe-weed anywhere around here, but the design is close enough for me to call it a Hobbit-house.

A natural wood fence that I helped repair the first week.

Paul was offering some paid work for repairing a fence made out of Fir saplings. A portion of the fence had blown down the week before I arrived.

It blew over because there is no fence posts. The ground is too rocky to dig holes. They are using something called a rock-jack to hold the fence up. One of them had fallen apart, causing the fence to topple.

A few of the other guests and I made short work of the repair.

A view from the other side.

Rocket Mass Heaters

Taking a peek at the rocket mass heater in the other WOFATI.

There is also a tipi on the property that houses a ‘U’ shaped rocket mass heater. In the winter, at negative 10 degrees people were sleeping with no blankets in there, crazy right?

Ducks from one of the residents properties

A resident there has some ducks that wander around during the day. He’s named them all, including the group as ‘Ministry of Quacks’

Exploring the property a bit

The snow lightly powdering the trees make it look so magical.

Rex, the excavator

This is Rex, he’s been helping everyone build their berms and roads, his teeth have seen better days.

Practicing some macro photography

Love Shack, Baby Love Shack…

I stayed in this thing for the last week I was there. I had to go back to California to sort our some tax stuff from that year and tie up some more loose ends before moving on with my life.

I am used to rugged sleeping so it wasn’t so bad, luckily after the first night I was able to drag a mattress out of Paul’s house to use.

This is how I made coffee for the last few days, even when roughing it alone in a tiny cabin I must have good coffee.

Coffee makes everything better.

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

Thank you for reading!

Learning how to install laminate flooring

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

After bringing a friend of mine, Russell on at OHI Home, we began to take on extra side work from Lila. At first it was small stuff like fixing this or that, but eventually she started getting flooring work.

Learning laminate floor installation from my buddy Russell

This was great as it provided Russell and I with some extra income and I was able to learn a new trade.

First step, move the materials

We had the pleasure of moving all of this before we could get started. It wasn’t too bad, but if we had handled the materials ourselves they would have been delivered to the spot that we’d pull from when working. ;P

Second step, actually start working

Laying down the underlayment is very easy due to the brilliant design from ‘Luxury Laminate’. Instead of needing tape, it sticks together nicely with a peel-off adhesive strip.

It’s not the easiest thing to do in the world, but it’s pretty basic.

Cutting the boards just right to start

When you start a new section, you always cut at least three boards at once, making sure they are offset in a way similar to the picture.

This is done to lend a more natural look to the overall appearance of the install.

If everything was square and lined up perfectly, it would actually look really weird.

Laying the first boards down is critical to the whole project

This is arguably one of the harder parts of the job. Deciding where and how to start will determine how you will tackle problems at different times throughout the job.

Starting in one section in a certain way will affect how other parts of the house will be handled. Unless you’re doing a very small job, you really have to be thinking ahead the whole time.

Measuring out a tricky cut

Here Russell was showing me how to measure a tricky cut that went into the closet and under the door slightly.

‘Closing out’ the closet

As weird as that sounds, it is a term for finishing an area. And as it happens this was the first time I learned how to do it. In a closet…

The living room is almost finished, we only need to close out the last board

Even though it’s dirty as all hell, it is starting to come together. Large rooms like this actually go quickly with two people.

The ‘boards’ are more like legos that snap together and do most of the work. You gotta love laminate.

Making some tight cuts to make it around the corner

After closing out the living room we had some tight cuts to turn the corner into the kitchen-nook.

Our first real problem

After moving our way into hallway and bedroom we ran into our first real problem. You can’t see it in the picture, but the floor slopes up slightly into the kitchen area.

We were unable to get the board under both areas that it had to and snap it back into place within the other board.

Every time we’d get close the board would break, after a few of those we had to take a different approach.

Tackling the problem from a different angle

We ended up having to go backwards a few boards and work from the other direction. It wasn’t easy but we were able to achieve it without breaking any boards.

This was the hardest part of the job

Here we had to snap the boards together in a way that they don’t really want to go. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best solution we had at the time.

In the end we got it done and the hallway looked great.

Insurance inspector checking our work

Since this was a repair job from a flood, it was covered by an insurance company. That means we had to go through an inspector.

He was actually pretty cool after all was said and done. He even offered us more work, we which had to decline due to schedule conflicts.

Thanks Mark!

After we were done with the floors, we helped stage it as well

You don’t even notice the slope when you walk over it.

The toilet was a fun thing to learn how to remove and replace. ;P

It all really comes together nicely seeing it from start to finish like this.

I learned a lot of things on the various other floor and handyman jobs we scored. While there is still a whole hell of a lot I can still learn, I am confidant I could install laminate flooring on my own now.

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

Thank you for reading!

Working for a Staging Company

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Before I met Lila and Dines, the owners of Ojai Home, I had no idea what home staging was. I didn’t know what I was missing out on.

Working for a staging company was one of the coolest experiences of my life

Working for them, I learned a lot about the intangible concepts of design. Especially how a design should make someone happy.

Huge den with fireplace in the east end of Ojai California

This was in the East End of Ojai California. When we got there, it looked nowhere near this.

Some like a modern living room

A lot of times clients would want something more modern that suited the buying trends at the time.

Others, a rustic living room

Other times, a bit more of a traditional design approach is needed to entice buyers in certain situations.

All glass living room

This was a particularly nice living room that really stood out to me. Sometimes a space demands to be almost left alone with a very minimal touch.

It’s the little things

A lot of the choices a stager makes are small, but add up to something more than the sum of all the parts. This is where the art of the design is.

Every staging company has a massive amount of pillows

After a good buddy of mine started working with us, we rigged up this pillow storage solution in one of our warehouse spaces.

My little truck, loaded down

Here is my little Mazda B-3000 loaded down as much as she’d go. Often we’d have both trucks operating on the same job to get everything done quicker.

Lila’s truck loaded with as much as physically possible

All in all I really miss working for OHI Home. The sense of family was very strong from day one, with Lila inviting me over for dinner weekly. Dines, her husband who I actually got the job through, is still one of my favorite people of all time.

Working with him at lynda.com was a really fun experience and I’ll cherish the memories we made there. That my friends is a story for another day, and another time.

😜

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

Thank you for reading!

Working for a Small Beverage Company

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I started working for Lori’s Original Lemonade around September of 2013.

Lori’s Original Lemonade ‘LOL’ was a really amazing place to work

From my about page:

Working in produce is when I met Lori, of Lori’s Original Lemonade

When I first saw her come in and sample the Lavender Lemonade, I was thunderstruck. Great ingredients, it tasted terrific, she was energetic and exciting to talk and listen to, but most of all it was the unseen qualities on display that attracted me to the brand. Even though the first bottles are nothing like the ones currently sold, I saw the name had an incredible potential.

It was something to behold to watch her with the customers and how they reacted, how I responded to the quality and intensity of the product. I could be more like that I told myself, so I set out to test the waters about helping her out.

I guessed that I wasn’t the only one interested so I decided to try and set myself apart in a positive way. It grew from a few conversations about social media tactics and business logistics to a potential job offer and blossomed into a weekly half-day delivery gig.

The Lori’s Original Lemonade van ‘LOL Van’

This is the original van that Lori bought from a local tennis academy. She was able to get it for a great deal and it served her very well until upgrading.

I personally drove that thing up and down the central coast of California and down into Los Angeles while helping her grow her company.

Eventually the van began to be a ‘bottleneck’

No pun intended

Eventually the van was unable to keep up with how much lemonade the company started to sell.

We did our best with what we had for as long as we could, but Lori had to start looking for better options.

Renting trucks to deliver pallets of lemonade

We even tried renting trucks to deliver pallets. This was actually the largest truck that one could drive without the need for an additional license.

Here I am unloading a pallet for a new store in the Thousand Oaks area.

I created and maintained beautiful displays at several key stores along the central coast of California

A large entrance display at a Vons location.

A quaint little table top display in the produce department at another Vons location.

Small entrance display at a private market in Camarillo California.

I helped move offices

During my last days at the company, I helped move into a new office space.

Since I was also working for a home staging company at the time, I had a little input on the design.

I also helped layout the shelves in a way that made sense for the workflow and storage needs of the company.

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

Thank you for reading!

Attending a Tech Conferene In Las Vegas

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 GMT

At the airport, I remember being anxious to get the flight over with. This was actually my first time flying, ever.

I had the opportunity to attend a tech conference

It wasn’t so bad, but I was nervous at first I will admit.

Aaron who runs Pocketfullofapps.com, and I heading out for the night

After settling in to our hotel rooms, we set out to check out the town.

It wasn’t a long walk from our hotel to the strip. We didn’t stay in a fancy place, but it wasn’t far.

Victory meal

We eventually had to stop for something to eat, and this burger place smelled amazing so we went for it.

Las Vegas street artist

I ended up buying one that looks a lot like the one on the right. They are amazing to watch and not very expensive.

At the Conference

When we finally arrived at the conference it wasn’t very packed yet as we were actually pretty early.

Collision Conference booths

There were so many booths that it was impossible to visit every one in the two days of the conference. Especially because each day had different vendors.

Night on the town

After the first day of the conference, we went out on the town again. This time, we wanted to explore a bit more.

After thoughts

The second day of the conference was actually pretty boring, we ended up leaving early for an after party which was very fun. I didn’t really know anyone there but I felt in good company and entirely safe.

Even though everyone around me were pretty much strangers.

A note about this post

This wasn’t actually posted on the date listed. I am adjusting the dates to match around when the events happened.

jpshlk.com

Tags as Content: Why I Made Each Tag an MDX Page

Tags as a content collection, not strings

What a real tag page buys you

The cost side

Turning My Homepage Into a Landing Page

The anatomy

The About page stays (with a smaller job)

The random quote bug (part 4’s rule, striking again)

One small SEO note

A Tiny Design System and a Dark Mode That Works

What “design system” means for a blog

Why dark mode toggles break

Bug 1: the flash (FOUC)

Bug 2: view transitions eat your JavaScript

Did it actually work?

Starting Clean With Astro 7 and Tailwind 4

The entire dependency list

Why Astro 7 was the right risk

The config, in TypeScript

Tailwind 4: the config file is gone

Don't Keep Your Git Repos in iCloud

Bug 1: my blog grew duplicate posts

Bug 2: git said I deleted my entire website

Bug 3: fatal: mmap failed

One cause behind all three

Git and file sync can’t share a folder

Getting out was worse than getting in

What actually worked

Where repos belong

Back Up Your Site With a Git Branch

”Isn’t git already a backup?”

The whole backup

Actually using the backup

Branches vs. tags (two-sentence version)

The mindset shift

How I Rebuilt My Blog From Scratch With AI

Why rebuild at all?

How the AI part actually worked

The plan we landed on

The plan kept growing

What I’d tell past me

I Guest-Host A Podcast About Shortcuts

RoutineHub Live Review Sessions - Episode 5: Focusing On Simplicity

Show Notes

UI Actions Beta - First Impressions

What Is Shortcuts And Why Should You Care?

Enter UI Actions - Control Mac Apps With Shortcuts

The actions included are quite good and have the potential to automate a lot of tasks:

Setting Up UI Actions

Download The Beta And Check Out The Forum

There's A New Scam In Town - And It's Very Sophisticated

I Saw This Today On Mastodon

He Goes On To Mention Just How Sophisticated This Attack Is

Some Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself

Staying Safe Means Being Smart - And It Takes Work

Update From Terence

Setapp - Powerful Apps For Powerful Workflows

Dozens Of Powerful Apps Under One Subscription

Is The Value Proposition Worth It?

Here’s A Quick Breakdown Of The Apps, The Cost, And Some Notes:

A menu bar manager that offers a lot of features and customization.

Adds a ton of screenshot features over macOs’s built-in functionality.

A tiny app that will accurately measure anything on your screen, within any app.

Another tiny app that lets you grab color values from anything on your screen.

A powerful Mac system monitor that provides detailed stats in the menu bar.

Some Final Thoughts

Still Thinking About It?

Darksun - A Dark Sky-Inspired Weather App

An Homage To The Former Weather King

Weather At A Glance

Minimal Settings With Helpful Tips

Dark Mode Needs A Little Work

Powered By Open-Source Data

Hinting At More Features

Free Forever With Optional In-app Purchases Or Subscriptions

Only Time Will Tell If Darksun Can Weather The Future

Download Darksun On The App Store

Thanks For Reading!

Ice - A MacOS Menu Bar Manager