A little over a month ago, I ran into an issue on this blog with ContentLayer. In short, I had transitioned to NextJS 14, and the package did not yet support it. There was an open pull request that seemed to fit all the criteria for the fix. Perfect! Now all that was needed for a maintainer to merge…

This morning I read a piece by The Verge that outlined how the modern web is being shaped almost entirely around SEO, even when authors don’t want it to be. I took a quick look at my Google Search Console, and to my surprise I was actually getting impressions for some search terms other than my name. I’ve never actually tried to engineer the SEO for this blog in any way, as I don’t have any need to. This site doesn’t generate any revenue, and reader numbers only serve as feedback to me that I am writing something worth reading.

I am always skeptical of techniques (specifically apps) that claim to be “life changing”. Todo software has always been the one thing that never stuck for me. After trying everything from Vikunja to todoist I was ready to throw in the towel on the idea for good. Then Habitica came along, and has changed a lot of things for the better.

Take a look through any internet security forum and you will find a ton of debate around the right way to stay secure online. For some that means using a password manager that never touches the internet, and handling the backups yourself. For others, this means the expertise and infrastructure that comes with a cloud option. For MFA, a hardware security key used to be the absolute best answer, however with passkeys now entering the mix, there is renewed debate around how necessary these devices are. Regardless, all of this makes very little sense to the average non-technical user, and that’s a huge problem.

I have a bad habit of jumping on the latest and greatest quite quickly. Whether that’s notetaking applications like Obsidian or Logseq, a read-it-later application like raindrop.io or Omnivore, or a text-editor like VSCodium or Lunarvim I have gone through quite a lot of change in 2023. In the year ahead, I would like to slow down and take better stock of what is working, and trim down what isn’t. In addition to just having less to generally worry about, this will also allow me to use annual pricing to save money.

I was looking to spice up my site a little with a coordinated colour theme. I use cattppucin for my terminal theme and I wanted to use the same colours for my site. I found a tailwindcss plugin that pulled in catppuccin colours and made them available in tailwindcss via their common name: “pink”, “blue”, “green”, etc. This was great, but I didn’t want to have to manage two sets of colours for light and dark mode. I discovered a clever trick to make this work using a single className within the layout.tsx file in my NextJS setup, and I wanted to share it here on the off chance that someone else is also a fan of this colour scheme.

I am not sure why the need suddenly dawned on me, but I thought, “wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to post to mastodon without having to go through the trouble of opening up the browser on my computer?”. As a result, I stumbled upon toot (yes, this is what posts on mastodon were originally known as). This amazing tool allows the user to both browse and post to the fediverse directly from the command line, via a simple and easy to remember command, toot.

Yesterday, Spotify laid off approximately 17% of its workforce, citing macroeconomic trends and a drive for efficiency. Spotify currently controls 30% of the global streaming market with Apple Music and Tencent Music being the other big winners.

Those that know me would describe me as a privacy-conscious person. When I talk to many people about privacy, they shutter at the thought of having to give up the connection they value with their friends online, or about not having a public presence on the internet. I get it, having an online presence in 2023 is all but essential for many careers, and opens the doors to new opportunities at a global scale. Due to the extensive data collection engaged in by almost all big tech companies, we have come to equivocate having such a public presence with giving up our privacy. I’m hoping to illustrate here that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

With the ubiquity of “social” sites in 2023, it is easy to forget that the world did not always operate with an omnipresent online mirror as a backdrop. To get to where we are today, the internet, and the behaviours adopted by society since its advent, had to take shape one piece at a time. Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz is the story of that journey, making it a great read to see repeating cycles of platform booms and busts that have delighted users, tormented creators, and lead to the birth of many techno-billionaires.