Implementing OAuth in Astro / / No Comments As I continue to dig into Astro, one of the areas I wanted to explore was security and authentication. The Astro docs have an entire section on authentication in which they mention multiple different third party projects you can use with Astro, but I wanted to take a stab at building something myself. Once again I figured this would be a useful way to get some experience with parts of Astro I had not used yet, specifically sessions and middleware. We all know what OAuth is… right? I can remember being incredibly confused by OAuth in the past. Honestly I felt like I was the only one who didn’t get it. So I forced myself to build a few demos in that area to help it click and I realized... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Implementing, OAuth
Finding Your Most Popular Bluesky Followers / / No Comments A long time, like, a really long time ago, I created a web app that would take your Twitter followers and then sort them by the number of followers they had. This was, of course, next to useless but was a fun excursion into the Twitter API and kinda cool to see "big names" following me. We all know what happened to the Twitter API, and Twitter itself, but last night I decided to take a stab at building something similar for Bluesky. If you don’t care about the how and just want to see the result, you can play with it here: https://happy-mountain-lamb.codepen.app/ Still here? Ok, let’s talk turkeycode! The Bluesky API I’ve built a number of demos already using Bluesky’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Bluesky, finding, Followers, most, Popular
Links For You (3/8/26) / / No Comments Greetings, programs. I’m taking a break from Assassin’s Creed Shadows (and being lazy in general) and thought I’d write up my links post. Yesterday was the 15th birthday of one of my kids and later today we get to celebrate with her friends. Outside of that and laundry, I’ve got a large amount of nothing to get accomplished today and I absolutely love it. Let’s get to the links. As always, I hope you find these worth your time! Eleventy’s Future As you know (or hopefully know), my blog here is built on Eleventy, a Node.js static site generator. I’ve been using it, and blogging about it for almost six years. This past week, Zach announced that Eleventy... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/8/26, links
Building My Own Social Network Poster in Astro / / No Comments Today is a big day for Astro, not only do you get Astro v6 (it just released a few hours ago!), you also get one of my demos! Ok, one of these is more important than the other, but, I’m really excited about v6 and hope to have a demo of the new features to share soon. With that being said, I’m also sharing a demo I started work on a few weeks ago and finally wrapped up this past weekend – Social Beast. What is Social Beast Social Beast is a web app meant to be run locally (although I have some thoughts on that restriction and will share at the end) that handles posting to multiple social networks at once. Right now "multiple" is two: Mastodon Bluesky It doesn’t... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, building, Network, Poster, Social
Testing Live Content Collections in Astro V6 / / No Comments Yesterday, Astro V6 formally launched. I say "formally" as it’s been available to test for a little while, but with me still being pretty new to Astro I’ve kept to the main release only. Now that V6 is the default, I thought it was time to dig into it a bit. One feature in particular stood out as being really useful to me – live content collections. One of the reasons I’ve been digging Astro so much is that it nicely straddles the SSG world and Node.js server worlds. When building your app, you can make logical decisions about what should be done at build time versus what should be done dynamically. It’s like having Express and Eleventy rolled into one... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Collections, Content, live, Testing
Dynamically Adjusting Image Text for Contrast / / No Comments Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my favorite JavaScript libraries, Color Thief, had gotten a major update. Color Thief examines an image and can tell you the dominant color as well as the five most used colors. I thought this was pretty cool, and over the past, I kid you not, 14 years, I’ve blogged about it a few times: Demo of Color Palettes and PhoneGap – from way back in 2012 Capturing camera/picture data without PhoneGap – in 2013 Drag and drop image matching search at Behance – do people still use Behance? New Camera Hotness from Chrome – "new" as of 2017 Building a Progressive Color Thief – this was me exploring... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adjusting, Contrast, Dynamically, Image, text
Using Astro for a Combined RSS View and Generator / / No Comments Ok, before I start, let me just clarify this demo is kind of a remix of my earlier post about building an RSS aggregator in Astro. I did run into some interesting issues this time around though and I figured it was worth a share. At Webflow, our developer docs are separated into different sections per product. For most of our developer products, we’ve got changelogs. So for example, here’s the changelog for our Data APIs and here’s one for our MCP server. We try to be good stewards of our developer community and ensure we document everything as clearly as possible. Each of our changelogs has an RSS feed as well so if you’re using a feed reader, it’s an easy to keep... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, Combined, Generator, using, View
Using Val Town to Get Me to the Movies / / No Comments My wife and I both love going to the movies, but sometimes a few months will go by without us making it out there. Mostly we just forget what’s coming out and don’t realize till it’s already on a streaming app. I thought it would be nice to build a tool that could help remind me of upcoming movie releases so we can make our theater going more of a consistent habit. To accomplish this, I used the The Movie Database APIs and Val Town. The First Version Before I even considered building a tool like this, I investigated the TMDB reference to see how easy it was to get upcoming releases. Turns out, there’ve got an endpoint just for that: Upcoming Movies If you carefully read... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Movies, Town, using