2026-08-27 03:03:37
I've tried for months to redesign my site. I was fed up with the design and I wanted something new but every time I tried I would get halfway through the home page and decide I didn't like that either. There are seven half working examples in my test folder along with loads of others I'd sketched out or made some basic designs for. So I went a different way — I gave it a cool project name, Tabula Rasa, nuked everything, and started an entirely new site from scratch and just pulled it what I needed from my existing site.
I spent the last few years adding lots of fun features that I just don't need - lots of these have been removed in the redesign. My Lego collection is back on Brickset, my comics collection is on League of Comic Geeks, and I'm linking out to my FPC profile. Popular pages? Gone. Podroll? Gone. Changelog. Who gives a shit? Game achievements. Get rekt. Custom open graph images for every single page, adding another ~1000 pages to every single build? Straight to jail.
Some of these things might come back but I feel like a weight has been lifted. Now I can focused on the list of at least 30 things I've noted down that need doing. The new site is using Founder's Hand by Jen Wagner for headings and at the moment system-ui for the body.
2026-08-19 02:46:21
This update has been way too long - January was the last one. I kind of let weeknotes take over but they don't include the now part of a now page so I'm going to make an effort to update the now page every month while continuing with weeknotes in the sporadic fashion that I have been.
2026-08-17 19:11:08
The final thing I always do for a project is make the favicon and open graph image but finding a site not riddled with ads to generate these has always been a bit of a challenge. I've mostly been happy with RealFaviconGenerator although there's just too many options for my liking. I've long[1] had a todo item to try and make my own version that runs entirely client-side and asks the bare minimum of questions. I've now made it and it's called Favicons to Go. Thanks to Zoe for helping me with the name.
I wanted to make it as easy as possible to go from "I made an icon" to getting all the files I need without too much fiddling with options. Having said that, the site does have options for filling the background of transparent icons, generating an open graph image by centering the uploaded icon, setting the app name (used when saving web apps to your home screen), as well as choosing theme and splashscreen colour. All of this is stored to local storage so you can have your own defaults. Download gives you a zip of the files to put into a project. All done client-side.
From the code side, the icons are rendered to hidden canvases, then converted to png on download. For the favicon, I had to adapt a node script to build it manually. Most of the uploading and local storage code was ripped from DoodleScan. The zip generation is done with fflate.
Try Favicons to Go here.
I remember looking at this idea during lockdown in 2020 ⤾
2026-08-15 18:24:25
To start with, both my wife and I have alerts turned off because when they did a test in 2023 we had a one month old baby and didn't want her to be disturbed. Leaving it off because I assumed this would be abused, as I believe it has in this case, was just a bonus.
Yesterday the government used the emergency alert system to send an alert to warn people not to start fires because it's hot and dry everywhere. The full text of the alert was:
There is a very high risk of wildfires nationally. Residents, landowners and visitors should not undertake any activity that could start a fire, including disposable barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators or fireworks. Even a small flame can rapidly develop into a major wildfire placing lives, homes, businesses and emergency responders at risk.
Follow official updates and report signs of fire immediately by calling 999. Search gov.uk/alerts for more information.
I posted about it then did some follow up posts but I don’t think I was able to capture what annoyed me so much about this properly so I’m trying again.
If you go to the alerts website linked it says "You may get alerts about any type of life threatening emergency". "Don't light fires please" is not a life threatening emergency.
Further down "When you get an alert, stop what you’re doing and follow the instructions in the alert." and if you're driving "find somewhere safe and legal to stop before reading the message". That is, these alerts are so important you should stop as soon as possible to read the information and "follow the instructions" which in this case are barely instructions.
If this was an alert for a tornado or earthquake the instructions of "find shelter" or similar would apply to basically everyone who got the alert. There is nothing actionable in the alert that was sent.
There are a lot of replies on Mastodon along the lines of "people are stupid they need reminding to not set fires during a drought and heatwave" and I totally agree that people, collectively, are stupid but this absolutely not what the emergency system is for and I'll be keeping mine turned off.
As an aside, I don't even need to have mine on because everyone posted about it immediately so even if it was a real emergency, I'd still find out pretty quickly so I guess the system works. Thanks gang.
2026-08-15 14:43:00
When I posted about my zine I mentioned being surprised that there wasn't any tools for showing zines online like a web component or similar. Turns out there is, web search is just shit now.
Andy pointed me to Zine Machine which is a web-based viewer that uses print styles to switch between web and print layouts. Benji is doing something similar with their zine here.
Then there's Dirty Little Zine which is a web based zine maker.
I added some notes to my list about zine-related projects I wanted to try and one of them was a zine splitter. The idea was to take an image and split it into eight separate images for viewing online, or downloading.
Ragman beat me to it. He built Zine Cutter which works perfectly and has saved me a job.
2026-08-14 02:37:45
I announced the shut down EchoFeed which I intend to write more about soon. I shipped Doodle Scan this week which you can read about here. I also made a zine and I was on a podcast. I have a couple of other things I'm working on which should be out soon.
I've finally had time to sort through an obscene amount of links I had saved and there was a lot of good stuff in there. Who knew?
Chris built his own font and has lots of tips about how to go about doing that.
delphitools is a collection of "privacy-first browser tools" which is what I was going for with DoodleScan and some other upcoming projects. Lots of good stuff here.
Matt & Nick's Stupid Adventure is a review blog ranking energy drinks. No RSS feed though, boo 👎.
A couple of little website dinguses - Pocket Bird and TownSquare. Fun.
The Closet allows you to browse all the Criterion movies as if you're in the closet. I have bad movie opinions so there's nothing here for me.
A script to make detect similar images in your photo library and make wigglegrams from them. What's a Wigglegram?.
CSS Buttons is a collection of nice buttons.
Improved CSS Text-Stroke and text stickers. Wild what you can do with CSS now.
The Definitive Guide to Neubrutalist Web Design. Hot.
The Website Specification is a useful reference for all the things you need to include in your website like metadata and such.
I love these doodle projects from Fountain Pen Love.
Do I need another hobby? No. Do I want to make my own rubber stamps? Yes.
Noice - Noice helps generate SVG filters for noise textures.
chiriapp/chiri: 🍃 Cross-platform CalDAV task management app.
Computer Modern is the font made for TeX. This project converts them all to web-friendly formats.
A bookmarklet to quickly check how your alt texts are doing.. Nice.
This Proof of Purchase project is so cool.
Another editor called GRAM. It has a frog logo so worth checking out.
