Cory Dransfeldt

Now

I'm a software developer in Camarillo, California. I enjoy hanging out with my beautiful family and 4 rescue dogs, technology, automation, music, writing, reading, tv and movies.

🐱 You know when i told you i would never lie? Well, that was the first time.

Weaving music data in and out of my personal website

I started integrating music data into my personal website when I added Last.fm artist and album displays to my now page. Initially, I tried sourcing artist images from a few different services, knowing that Last.fm had updated their API to stop serving them. After a fair bit of searching I found that most services that supplied artist images covered only a small fraction of my library and often supplied the wrong image when there were multiple artists sharing the same name.

Building a bespoke now-playing web component

I've long had a now playing element on the home page of my site that displays either what I've checked into on Trakt, the Lakers' record and who they're playing when a game is on or the last song I've listened to. After leveraging some new web components on my site, I decided to refactor the code powering this into a web component specific to my needs.

Automatic Mastodon post embeds

I use Nicolas Hoizey's GitHub action to syndicate my web activity to Mastodon. Recently, I removed the display of webmentions from my posts after seeing Chris and Robb discuss some privacy concerns around them. Upon seeing David Darnes' mastodon-post web component, I've gone ahead and added it, conditionally, to the end of each of my posts.

Using B2 as a JSON data store

My links page is powered by the Readwise Reader API but because there are, quite reasonably, rate limits in place, I've gone ahead and reduced the page count I fetch on each build and cached older link data from past builds in a B2 bucket.

Adding a light-dark theme toggle

I dropped a light/dark theme toggle into the navigation of my site, replacing the prior reliance on the visitor's preference set at the OS level (though it does still consider this preference).

Setting up image transforms in Eleventy

Eleventy added a transform option to process images in Eleventy v3.0.0-alpha.5 and Image v4.0.1 so, naturally, I had to set it up on my site. If you don't want to read this post, you can check out the full diff for the changes.

Renting your music means accepting that it will disappear

When I was using Apple Music I had a smart playlist that would surface music that was no longer available on the service and having to do that sums up one of the many problems with music streaming services. It's not really your collection — you're renting it and your collection only exists on that service. If it disappears, your collection disappears.

On getting tattooed

I got my first tattoo over ten years ago. It was a few lines from Tom Waits' Coney Island Baby set on the inside of my left bicep as a dedication to my then fiancĂŠ and now wife of ten years. I was told recently that that's a really painful spot but, I suppose, I didn't know what I was getting into outside of having an artist recommended by a dear friend that I trust implicitly.