#now playing: Pictures of Purple Skies by Memorex Memories

I have been enjoying the "no frills" aspect of running a blog on bear so far. the one thing I am missing from my previous blog setup, however, is a way to quickly experiment with the CSS of my blog.

while bear's dashboard has been pretty convenient to quickly edit some CSS variables, I feel if I want to do deeper edits the "tweak -> publish -> refresh" loop will feel like a slow to me.

so I did what I usually do in those situations: I write some JavaScript^[1] about it.

The code is on https://github.com/eramdam/files.damien.zone but the logic is pretty straightforward:

• run a web server running on localhost:3000 (I'm using fastify but i'm sure any web server thing for Node would work)
• run an instance of live-server in parallel (this one is key!)
• on every route, take the request's URL, transform the URL such that localhost:3000/foobar becomes damien.zone/foobar
• download the HTML from damien.zone/foobar, parse it, remove every stylesheets from it, and inject my own from the repo
• and lastly, inject a modified version of the injected.html file from the live-server repo, which will make the live reloading of stylesheets work

then the whole thing runs with a simple npm run start, I open localhost:3000 in my browser and.. it just works! I can edit my CSS freely and with instant feedback.

it feels like a very stupid solution but as I often like to say: "If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid".

see ya,
- damien

---

1. or rather, TypeScript these days, I'm not a fool ↩︎

#now playing: BRAT by Charli XCX_

the past weekend, like the past week before it, has seen me go through a whole gamut of emotions.

the good, the bad, and everything in between, I feel I've gone through it all.

I keep telling myself that I feel very goofy for reacting so strongly about losing a website, and... I do still feel that way, but in the second part of the week, I realized that what I'm reacting to is losing the people I've interacted with, read and met on cohost. a space that truly felt special.

like I said in my previous article, cohost made me realize that I could just... do my little posts, be myself, cringe, sometimes annoying, loud, vocal about my interests and people would show up.^[1]

I think it will warrant a whole section of the article I will write about my "story with cohost" and online in general but I've come to realize that microblogging really, really isn't for me any more dude. or at the very least, not the version of it that Twitter^[2] presents as the "default".

for all its issues^[3], Mastodon has always felt like a "quieter Twitter". but it still had Numbers™️ and was still very much trying to emulate Twitter, despite what its creator might say. so I will definitely keep using it. the fact that I'm now running my own instance is also helping me feel like I have more control over it. but it will be for the "I ate an apple today, it was very juicy" type posts.

for everything else, I had cohost, and now I have damien.zone.

at any rate! the "goals" or at least "guidelines" I want to set for myself in this space are:

• be…Read more

So. cohost, huh?

If you're reading this, you probably know me from that place (or at least have heard about it) so I don't think it's really useful to try to give you the "elevator pitch".

what would a pitch be useful for anyway, right?

I have a lot I want to say about cohost. but I think the shutdown announcement is still too recent for me to be able to form any coherent thoughts yet.

the one thing that I will say about cohost is that it, as a site and "community"^[1], taught me that I can "exist online"^[2] without worrying about being "clean" or "proper" or "right".

most of my existence online was on micro-blogging platforms with short character limits and a high incentive to product the "One Good Take" about everything and anything. and I'm frankly done with that.

or at least I'm done with it being my only outlet for Thoughts online. and I have cohost to thank for for letting me experiment and find this out about myself.

I already have a website that I was planning on using as my new place for long/medium form writing but after trying (and failing) to get anything written there I came to a conclusion. my friend evie is right in that "you gotta make it easy to post".

as far as I can tell bearblog seems to strike a right balance between making it easy and letting me tinker with things while not letting me fall into what some might call "the developer's blog curse". so here I am.

erambert.me will still exist as "the website I give by default" both because I like the separation of "concerns" ('business card type site' versus 'just me writing') and also because so much is…Read more

The Mastodon instance I've been on for the past 7 years, octodon.social is shutting down next year. So rather than try to find a replacement, I decided to run my own, single-user instance.

The issue isn't that good, well-moderated instances don't exist, they do! But one of the big reasons why I stayed on Octodon was because I knew the moderation team personally so I trusted their decisions and agreed with most of them. I just frankly couldn't be bothered with having to find and vet a new instance and I like to tinker so, after some advices from my friend Niléane I went and spun up my own!

It's up at https://social.erambert.me and you can find me on Mastodon by looking up @eramdam@erambert.me.

The setup isn't anything too fancy:

• a dedicated server hosted by OVH
• OVH's object storage solution for media files behind Bunny
• running Mastodon 4.2.10 (current stable version at the time of writing)

All set up while following the official documentation.

The only quirk of my setup might is that the "local domain" (domain the instance responds to) and the "web domain" (domain where the Web interface lives) are different. Meaning that people can find me by looking up @eramdam@erambert.me despite the actual instance running on https://social.erambert.me. It's a behavior that is well documented by Mastodon and is usually trivial to implement when you host your website on your own server...

Except I don't do that 😅 My website is, for now, running on Astro and hosted on Vercel so I can't just modify the web server configuration to set up the necessary redirection.

Now, I'm not the only one that tried to do this with a similar setuip link link link. But none of those solutions were satisfactory for me because:

1. they…Read more

Inspired by "Lack of Vision" by Louie Mantia.

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

I have been thinking about this quote recently.

I've never really considered myself an artist. Sure, I've spent hours upon hours messing around in Photoshop as a teenager on the family computer, learning graphic design by following tutorials written by other amateurs. Does that make me an artist? I don't know.

I've always been more into what we'd call web design and UI design. I've learned the ropes of all of this by just fiddling with existing things. It might feel "pointless" to an outsider, but I remember taking great joy in essentially doing "vector tracing" with Photoshop's Pen tool over various pictures of my favorite fictional characters, pieces of tech and such.

All in service of figuring how to reproduce that one gradient, that one visual effect, etc. I distinctly remember doing that over a (I didn't know it was at the time) render of Apple's iconic Cinema Display.

For fun, I was messing around.

Around 2009 or so, I got my first iMac (the first aluminum one). I had been lusting for this computer for a long time before my parents got it as a birthday present. I browsed Apple's website, enamored by the design of the hardware and the software.

I was so enamored by the visual, dare I say artistic, quality of the software (I couldn't judge anything else by that point) that I had gotten into the hobby of disguising my Windows XP installation into Mac OS X "Tiger" and later on, Mac OS X "Leopard".

Even after getting my Mac, I didn't stop obsessing over that aspect of my computing life. I took any excuse I could to change my system or Dock icons by downloading a pack from The Iconfactory, MacThemes.net…Read more