web development

My daughter's winter break got kind of blown up in 2022 due to some really broken weather patterns and Southwest Airlines' inability to cope with them, so we spent a lot more time at home than we expected. As it sometimes does, that resulted in a couple projects leveraging our big stash of Perler Beads, both in terms of making new designs and in sorting out some of our myriad colors that got mixed together.

In the first half of my CDN blog, I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

Using Photoshop's scripting support to address disconnects between art production and legacy code for a large-scale consumer-facing website, complete with some open-source code for you.

I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.

A couple months back, I read in Wired (in hard copy, no less, because I'm one of those weirdos) Clive Thompson's column "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding". It resonated with me at the time, but I sat on the article until I could also link to it, and now it's too late to really weigh in on it, because as soon as it hit the web it blew up. The post has nearly 125k shares on Facebook as I write this, in fact, and way more Facebook comments than any of their recent posts that don't involve America's President.

In this second post discussing the current design of the website you're on as you read this, I go more into detail about how I drew out the art assets for alvies.org and built it all to go together. Of course, by the time you're reading this, the technical details are out of date, but I probably won't write much more about that.

I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale.

Why would you want to read an article about Drupal 8 when it was still in its infancy? Okay, well, fine, click the links if you insist.

Does a Homer Simpson reference read in the title of a blog post? I don't think so, but that's what this is. Also, the article is about Sublime Text, which if you're still using by the time you read this blurb, you probably already know everything therein.