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Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, I remember watching the attacks from the roof of my Lower Manhattan apartment, and reflect on how that morning changed my view of the world.

A theme update breaks a hero image on Safari. A hosting provider changes a default. A CMS plugin starts injecting something. Nobody notices for six weeks, and when someone finally does, the only honest answer to “when did this start?” is a shrug. I have given that shrug more than once. This week I shipped Screenshot-a-Day v0.1.0 so I would stop having to. The idea is not new around here. It has been sitting on this site as a sketch since May 2024, back when I assumed the answer was a $10/year SaaS running Puppeteer on a Lambda. What actually shipped went the other direction on almost every one of those assumptions, and the reasons are the interesting part.

I clicked the “Latest release” badge in Ryder’s README and landed on v0.0.1-alpha, dated January 2024. That would have been unremarkable if it were the latest release. It wasn’t. Ryder had shipped v0.1.0 through v0.2.4, but the release workflow marked every automated release as a prerelease. GitHub excludes prereleases from that badge, so two years of releases were present, downloadable, and effectively invisible from the project’s front door.

I roam these mountains Alive, alone, in love with life. Strange to some, yes I don’t try to explain I can’t explain The feelings I have here In this land of no men Of mountain ranges and rivers. My mind empty, my heart free. — Li Po, Heron Dance translation.

The Obsidian CLI is here and it’s genuinely exciting for anyone doing open project management. Being able to script vault operations, trigger note creation, and automate workflows from the command line — without touching the GUI — opens up a whole new world of integration possibilities.

The landscape of AI coding assistants is evolving rapidly, and two recent developments from Steve Yegge are particularly interesting: Beads and Gas Town. These innovations address one of the fundamental challenges facing coding agents today: maintaining context and memory across sessions.

A new way to deploy my hugo websites A simple and cost-effective approach to deploying Hugo projects to AWS CloudFront. I have and still do use services like AWS Amplify and Netlify to automate my CI/CD pipeline for many of my projects, triggered by a GitHub check-in and running in GitHub Actions. However, for a recent photography project that involved deploying a large number of files, storing everything in GitHub wasn’t feasible. I needed a solution that was simple, affordable, and delivered high performance. That’s when I decided to use AWS CloudFront with an S3 bucket, integrated with an SSL certificate generated through CloudFront. Why AWS CloudFront?

Limit your home page feed by Section, Category or Tag You can now set params in your hugo.toml file to keep any pesky pages off your homepage that you may not wish to promote for whatever reason.

Check out the new Ingredients Taxonomy pages Using Taxonomy effectively As part of the recipe template configuration being developed for The Ryder Theme for Hugo websites, a new taxonomy is created for ingredients. Ingredients are not the same as recipeIngredients; they are defined as an array in the front matter. I didn’t want a taxonomy page generated for every single recipe ingredient, so I created a separate variable. The recipeIngredients are used to display the ingredients on the page and for the recipe schema, ensuring the pages are properly displayed as recipe rich results in Google and other search engines.

Cloudy days a hoy-hoy I found this partial to create a tag cloud on Mert Bakir’s personal website and I have been adapting the code to suit my needs for this project, for now I’m just leaving it under this project page until I can decide what to do with it.

Optimize Recipe Content with the Schema The recipe templates for The Ryder Theme for Hugo websites are progressing well. Today I released an update that creates the schema.org json-ld specification tags for a recipe. This allows your recipe content to show up as “rich content” in search engines and social media platforms.

Pulled to Black On May 10, 2024 solar flares caused extreme G5 conditions to be observed

I made this quick and easy shortcode to get started using leaflet.js in the Ryder Theme for Hugo Websites, as I add more features supported by leaflet to the shortcode I might update this page.

A super simple alpinjs image gallery The first place I used this is on the recipe page about my mom’s family recipe cookbook

A styled RSS feed makes your site more usable When you put a link to your rss / atom feed on your website it is a link to a raw xml file designed for feed readers such as feedly to import them and provide the reader with all their internet in one place.

A tunnel to your desktop This is something I have done in the past and it usually involved pretty in-depth knowledge of the shell and networking, but now there is a free service that makes it oh-so-easy to spin up a tunnel with a public human readable domain name for temporary viewing of your local network development environment on the internet.

I created a pick-a-squares game template, aka the Super Bowl squares. It is still a work in progress, but I hope to have it snazzy in time for next year. Take a look at the template. Project Goals Ability to enter people into squares Generate random score rows with animated flourish Presentation mode for big screen action with controller to enter periodic scores Calculate payouts based on price of a square Project Timeline Launch in time for SB LIX success Pick a Square: Head on over to the project page

Get the first of something in a collection For example the first jpg image in the current directory starting with the word feature.

This is what it looks like I use Hugo a lot for my web development work, and I think it is pretty great. The one problem with it for many non-technical people I work with is that there is no CMS feature, they want a website administration page where they can do the usual.

Here are some useful partials I use in this theme. layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html This replaces the default markup template for rendering an image when the markdown code  is used. It calls another partial you have to add to your theme or layout directory in your site called ImageConverter.