melkat.blog

I often recommend a lot of apps for different platforms to people, so I decided to catalogue them recently. I admins, it is a little much, lol, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it updated. I might not, but a lot of these apps have been with me for a long time.

I do want to comment on how I listed the prices: the cost to avoid subscriptions is what I listed. Some of these apps are free, and you may not need to pay for them, or you could pay less, but I thought it was important to set expectations up front.

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.

I don’t think I ever introduced my software company, Girlfriend Technology, on this blog.

Girlfriend Technology is a software company I started to distribute apps under. My goal is to build apps that can benefit queer people, or at least think of them first instead of as an afterthought.

My app, X to Y, stemmed from a former employer not allowing me to change my name at work to be my legal name. I got tired of seeing my deadname and made my own personal browser extension to fix it.

X to Y got a nice update last week to allow it to play nice on webpages with dynamic content. The next update will help with backing up and restoring preferences.

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~

Ever think it would be funny to replace a word with another? Sick and tired of a website deadnaming you? You are going to enjoy X to Y! X to Y supports plain text, regex, and urls.

Tired of seeing “Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid.” alerts when you try to open a magnet link? This Safari extension helps by adjusting the links to go through Put.io

Time to replace your improv partner! You’ve played AI Dungeon, now play Improv Dungeon. Write out your scenario and the AI will play along!

I have now published publicly for the first time the code that powers this website.

Hey I just wanted to share that I open sourced a weekend experiment I made a few weekends ago to track pitch frequencies. It’s not the best, but I learned so much in building it within a few constraints: using React Hooks and must work on mobile Safari as well as desktop browsers.

Around maybe five years ago I launched a gif management system for myself. I finally rewrote it to be fast and no longer hosted on a computer in my home. Phew!

Hi my name is Melanie. This is my webpage with links to a lot of things that I do.