Qubyte Codes

I've been tracking my Japanese language study session since 2022. You can see the first year report for comparison…

This time last year I put together some custom scripts to send a record of each study session to my personal site using the micropub endpoint. You can see them here. Each entry says what I did, how long I did it for, and when I started doing it. On their own these aren't particularly interesting or useful. They mostly serve to hold me accountable. However, now that I have a full year of data, it seems like a good time to see if there are any trends…

I went to ffconf 2022 a couple of weeks ago, and two of the talks in particular resonated with me... (more actually, but these felt actionable)…

The :has() CSS pseudo-class opens up all sorts of possibilities. I wanted to see if it could simplify how I handle the ruby text (annotations above or below text to help with reading) in my Japanese notes. It works (in Safari and Chrome at least, and hopefully Firefox soon)…

Markdown is the standard for writing in techie circles these days, but it's pretty minimal. For a readme it's all you need, but if you create a site around Markdown like I have then you pretty quickly bump into its limitations. Markdown is deliberately limited, so it's no fault of the language or its creator…

This site uses a static site generator to build plain HTML pages. Since there's no database to add, update, or delete pages from, determining when to dispatch mentions can be challenging! Here's how I use a Netlify build plugin and an atom feed to manage it…

I use marked to do the markdown rendering for this blog. A recent feature makes it possible to create custom block types with a little hacking. In this post I show you how…

I had a great time last weekend at IndieWebCamp (IWC) Brighton. The first day was filled with discussions on various IndieWeb related topics. I attended discussions on…

That's right! After more than a year of talking about adding a dark mode I finally did it. The wider support for prefers-color-scheme is what pushed me over the edge. I'm also a slave to fashion…

I mentioned a new service which handles webmentions in a previous post. I decided to replace the glitch I've been using for one which is much leaner. It uses the library which powers webmention.app to handle webmention (and also older technologies like pingback) endpoint discovery and mention dispatch so I took this opportunity to ditch my own discovery code…

In a previous post I talked about an npm script I had written to be executed by a GitHub action…

In the past I used atd to schedule the publication of my blog posts. When I moved to Netlify I lost the ability to schedule posts, and didn't think about it until a recent conversation on twitter with Remy Sharp. Remy asked how to schedule blog posts for static sites and it got me thinking…

I made the source code for this site public! You can find it here. I've written at length about how I've built this, and having the code makes it easier to point to particular lines. I hope it'll inspire you to do the same…

It occurred to me a couple of days ago that it'd be neat to build a glitch to announce new blog posts. Since I deploy this blog by pushing to a master branch on GitHub, creation of a blog post is somewhat less obvious than when publishing on a platform like wordpress or medium, so I needed to figure out another approach…

I was recently tripped over by a subtlety in how service worker fetch events and fetch works in conjunction with content security policy (CSP). This happened while adding an image to the about page. This post is the result of a conversation I had with Jake Archibald on twitter (with thanks for helping me to understand what was going on)…

In a recent post I wrote that I had integrated webmentions, and some of that has since changed. Time for an update…

When I originally built this blog, I gave it a very simple no nonsense theme. One colour (beige) for the background and black for text and the odd horizontal rule. After a couple of minor iterations I added a sticky navigation bar (in CSS, no JS)…

In the last post about this blog I wrote about why I removed the service worker which made this blog a progressive web application…

It's been a while since the last entry about how I've built this blog. Since it is constantly evolving, now seems as good a time as ever to write about some of the changes I've made…

I touched briefly on the technology used in this blog in a previous post, but I didn't explain the motivation behind a lot of the choices I made when building it. I'd like to do that in this post. The design and architecture of this blog is the product of what things I like in other blogs, and also those things that I find frustrating. Where a choice was not obvious, I opted for the simplest option. The point of the exercise was to get it online. Below are a few points in no particular order…

This blog took a long time to get started. Every time I tried to build it, I wound up focussed on some tech I wanted to use to host it. In the previous iteration, I even wrote a server framework. I took some holiday over the Christmas period, so I decided to throw everything away and make something minimal…