melkat.blog

Only Mutuals. That was the joke I couldn’t get out of my head. So I decided to make a website that only my mutual followers could access. Nothing risqué, just things for my friends: like the wallpapers I used to design and so on.

While I had been playing with the Mastodon API, I had not been playing with the authenticated part. So I built an application that authenticates you with your Mastodon server and then checks to see if you are following me and if I am following you back. Nothing too fancy.

Over the past few months, I decided to familiarize myself with how the Mastodon APIs work across all servers, so I put together this site for simply viewing and sharing links to Mastodon posts. It’s very simple and minimal, but it also makes sharing very convenient on platforms like iMessage where you can’t see the content of a post.

I also used this as an opportunity to play around with some NextJS 13 features that I wanted to try out. If you are interested, head over to the repository on GitHub.

In San Francisco, when we get summoned for jury duty, we are lucky enough to have a website to check that tells us it will be updated at 4:30 pm on weekdays. It’s a pretty simple website, which makes it perfect for automating this task.

Ask Siri

You can use the Shortcuts.app on your Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and Mac. You will need to add your group number to the script for this to work.

Get San Francisco Jury Duty Status.shortcut

Home screen widget

There is a great app for iPhone and iPad called Scriptable that lets you write and run JavaScript that can make home screen widgets. You will need to set your group number on line with const GROUP_NUMBER.

Get SF Jury Duty Widget.js

Welcome to the blog that was known as melkat.link.

I had a fun technique for making a blog using a bookmarking service to act as my content management system. I never knew how the bookmarking service felt about how I was using it and it made my blog on external services.

A few months ago I heard about Astro, a new build tool for building websites in JavaScript. I’ve since made a few sites using it and have been pretty impressed. Before I was using Next.js, and I will continue to use it where appropriate.

The biggest change will be that I can no longer simply share a link to post on my blog. I will need to write a brand new Markdown file and deploy it, which brings it’s own set of benefits. For one, I can now write posts like this.

See you soon~

Virtual avatars for streaming and videos have become popular over the last few years. Now you can do it from your browser on your phone?! So cool.

I don’t know what’s more wild: a React hook that makes your custom UI elements accessible or that this came from Adobe.

Cassidy had an excellent talk today about building an adventure game with NextJS, which is definitely in my interests because I’ve been building my own visual novel in NextJS over the last few months.

I am oddly excited about the possibilities of using React Hooks in CLI tools.