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 and tv and movies.

🤖 CDNs are cool

.env files in Eleventy

dotenv-flow:

dotenv-flow extends dotenv adding the ability to have multiple .env* files like .env.development, .env.test and .env.production, also allowing defined variables to be overwritten individually in the appropriate .env*.local file.

The Eleventy docs recommend the dotenv package for working with .env files[^1], but I've found dotenv-flow to be a bit more useful inasmuch as support for .env* file patterns make development more convenient.

Automating RSS syndication and sharing with Next.js and GitHub

I wrote a basic syndication tool in Next.js to automate sharing items from configured RSS feeds to Mastodon. This tool works by leveraging a few basic configurations, the Mastodon API and a (reasonably) lightweight script that creates a JSON cache when initialized and posts new items on an hourly basis.

Building a now page using Next.js and social APIs

With my personal site now sitting at Vercel and written in Next.js I decided to rework my now page by leveraging a variety of social APIs. I kicked things off by looking through various platforms I use regularly and tracking down those that provide either API access or RSS feeds. For those with APIs I wrote code to access my data via said APIs, for those with feeds only I've leveraged @extractus/feed-extractor to transform them to JSON responses.

Workflows: handling inbound email on Fastmail with regular expressions (now featuring ChatGPT)

I've been using Fastmail for years now and have explored a number of different approaches to handling mail. I've approached it by creating rules targeting lists of top level domains, I've gone with no rules at all and a heavy-handed approach to unsubscribing from messages (operating under the idea that everything warrants being seen and triaged) and I've even used HEY.

Adding client-side rendered webmentions to my blog

My blog is currently hosted on weblog.lol which allows for a simple and configurable weblog managed in git with posts formatted in markdown. I wanted to add webmentions to my blog which, as of now, doesn't include a build step. To accomplish this, I've added an intermediary api endpoint to the same Next.js app that powers my /now page.