Turning Recipe Data into an Astro Content Collection / / No Comments As I continue to dig into, and learn, Astro, I thought I’d take a look at creating custom content collections. Content collections are pretty much exactly how they sound – collection of content items you can use within your Astro site. If you go through the excellent Astro tutorial you will find this discussed at the end in the final optional step step. Content collections aren’t required – you can build dynamic sets of data just using file system operations (and that’s how the tutorial has you build the blog) – but they make it easier (imo) to re-use content throughout the site. I encourage you to check out the docs, but generally content collections come... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 'turning, Astro, collection, Content, data, into, Recipe
An Astro site for my CSS Snippets / / No Comments As I think I’ve mentioned a few times already, I’m learning Astro and attempting to build random stuff with it just as an excuse to help practice and learn. With that in mind, during the Christmas break and between marathon sessions of Baldur’s Gate 3, I built a little site I thought I’d share here on the blog. To be clear, this is nothing special, and doesn’t come close to using all of the possible Astro features of course, but it was a useful coding exercise for myself and fun to build. The web platform as a whole has gotten dramatically better over the past decade, and CSS improvements are a big part of that. There is a huge amount of new CSS features I’m... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Site, Snippets
year plus plus… / / No Comments Welcome to my yearly "roundup" where I look back at my wins, accomplishments, and just about everything I did over the past year. As I always say, I assume no one really cares about this, but I like to take stock and honestly just remind myself of what I actually did. The years go by faster the older I get, but I swear they also feel longer as well. Of course, this year has been incredibly tough and that could account for that as well. Honestly, I don’t feel like rehashing the bad stuff. If you read this blog on the regular, yall already know what I went through, and as I’m ending the year on a high note, I’m going to focus on that. I love my new job, I’m relatively... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: plus, year
My Tech Stack (2025) / / No Comments Every now and then I like to share my current tech stack, not that I think I’m doing anything special in my day to day, but I know I enjoy reading about other devs and their stacks as it’s a great way to get introduced to tools I may want to adopt myself. As far as I can tell, the last time I did this was back in 2020 and things have certainly changed for me. So without further ado, here’s what I’m using. Operating System – OSX I’m back to Mac. To be honest, this was part frustration and part practicality. I’ve been on Windows for maybe 7 or 8 years now and generally happy with it. I usually did most of my work in WSL (Ubuntu) and as most of what I did... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2025, Stack, Tech
Using Chrome AI for Color Suggestions / / No Comments Today’s blog post came to me on the way to dropping of my kids at school and made complete sense to me, but I’ve also got the flu and am heavily medicated, so take that for what you will. The idea was simple, given a description of something in the real world, could I use AI to generate RGB colors that would represent that abstract idea. I thought this could be a good use of Chrome’s built-in AI model and decided to whip up a quick demo. The front end is pretty simple, just a form for you to enter your description and a place for the results: <h2>Description to Color</h2> <p> In the form field below, describe the color you are trying to recreate and Chrome... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, Color, Suggestions, using
The Twelve (Generative) Days of Christmas – 2025 Edition / / No Comments For the past two years I’ve done a fun little expirement – using GenAI to create illustrations from the Twelve Days of Christmas song. You can check out the 2023 and 2024 editions to see how things have progressed. In previous years, I mostly just kept things simple – passing only the day’s gift as the prompt: partridge in a pear tree two turtle doves three French hens four calling birds five golden rings six geese a-laying seven swans a-swimming eight maids a-milking nine ladies dancing ten lords a-leaping eleven pipers piping twelve drummers drumming Which is absolutely not ideal at all, but part of the fun was seeing how the various tools handled it. This year I decided... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2025, Christmas, Days, Edition, Generative, Twelve
Links For You (12/14/25) / / No Comments I cannot stress how much happier weekends are when you’re not looking for a job. I used to dread the weekends. No one was posting jobs, no one was responding to applications (usually), and it just made me anxious. Now – I’m enjoying the hell out of the weekend, and looking forward to Monday as my job continues to be fun as hell. Thing are good – and I’m doing my best not to be nervous/anxious about that. 😉 Here’s some links for your Sunday enjoyment. West of House For us old-timers, Infocom is fondly remembered as one of the great companies of early computing gaming history. Their text-based games were surprisingly deep and thoughtful, and fun to own as... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 12/14/25, links
My Last Spotify Demo (this time I mean it – honest) / / No Comments Earlier this month, I blogged about building my own Spotify Unwrapped. I did this by requesting a data export from Spotify and playing around with the data in Python and Astro. I built a simple, and probably bad, Astro site to view my stats. When I built it, I had an idea for a slight tweak to make it a bit better, but one that would require API usage. I stand by what I said about not wanting to use the API anymore (feel free to ask why in the comments), but I couldn’t resist tinkering one more time. Here’s what I did. Using Python to Enhance Artist Info In the output from Spotify’s export, you get a detailed listing of the tracks you’ve listened to. As a reminder, here’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Demo, honest, last, mean, Spotify, this, time