Jan Boddez @[email protected]

I’ve been using Mastodon for quite a while now—since #DeactiDay, give or take—but have never posted a proper #introduction.

So, I’m a thirtysomething mechanical engineer and lousy guitarist. I work in the semiconductor industry, spend most of my spare time developing for the web, and own quite a few affordable (!) electric guitars, a handful of Raspberry Pis, and a couple hacked together MAME—I know—cabinets. Also, happily married, father of two, wannabe investor.

#introductions

What I’m saying is, interests include #PHP, the #IndieWeb, #PunkRock, #HomeRecording, #art, and personal finance.

Anyway, it’s been nearly two years since my last real project guitar … which means I’m about to pick up something new. I _was_ going to order a brand-new but dirt-cheap “butterscotch blonde” Tele _or_ LPJ double cut copy—or both—from one of the huge German online stores … and then this ’70s nameless Japanese SG copy popped up.

Remember the Tele? Just got it out of its case to try and fix a pretty nasty neck bow. https://mastodon.social/@janboddez/101841745532050311

Drinking a Sjarel—Olense Tripel. http://sjarel.com/

#beer

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/83edf86eff)

In reply to https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/01/newsletters-blogs.

I’ve made that exact remark, too. It’s a tech bubble thing, I think, like static site generators and “modern JavaScript build pipelines.”

If anything did greatly reduce blogging’s popularity among the general populace, it would be Facebook and Twitter.

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/8d29c01263)

I was just reminded of this WooCommerce add-on I once made, that'd collect sales stats once a day and send out the results in an Excel sheet. Turns out it's still up and running. I can use this when I finally get around to making my own invoicing app.

Feed Thoughts https://jan.boddez.net/articles/feed-thoughts

Haha! One of my many projects-that-never-saw-the-light-of-day was called Stocklistr. (I only remember because there’s this entry in my password manager, still.)

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/11e0deb760)

Bookmarked https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/newsletters.

I, too, very much prefer blogs over newsletters! But, I mean, _did_ they? Was it newsletters?

> Newsletters killed blogs[.]

RSS?

> Alternatively, websites today […] can’t notify people of new work[.]

Sounds a wee bit like, “These days, _everyone_ is using static site generators.” (Pardon my French, but _no one who isn’t also a dev_ uses an SSG.)

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/bd6565e2fc)

And update mine instead. (Wait, I haven't gotten a new computer in over 6 years.)

Maybe I shouldn't read millionaires' "uses" pages (or blog posts on the subject).

Added “unread counts” to my RSS reader’s Microsub implementation. Fun fact: the reader itself—the new one—doesn’t display them. But Microsub clients will.

Some (not very) creative use of Laravel’s `hasManyThrough`, `withCount`, and `$casts` array is all it took!

#indieweb #laravel #microsub

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/bb85aa70b6)

In fact, what I need from an invoicing app is so simple (manage customers, create/edit invoices, send email) that I’m going to attempt to tackle this myself. Like, I don’t charge VAT—I’m that small a business. I don’t really do anything recurring, either. And mostly hard-coded templates would work just fine. Heck, I used to use Google Sheets before, and send everything out myself!

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/c7d6eafba9)

I knew the WordPress hook that handles hashtags would screw this up, but went through with it anyway. *adds to to-do list*

So, Invoice Ninja v4 doesn’t work with PHP 7.4 and up, and while that may not be too difficult to work around, there _is_ a v5. Which likely won’t work with my main hosting plan. On top of that, I’m trying to get rid of my VPS and the jungle of Docker containers.

#self-hosting

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/ce775972bf)

Made Liège waffles today, and they’re delish. https://dagelijksekost.een.be/gerechten/luikse-wafel

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/13b21fbecc)

Tailwind is, like, the complete opposite of the CSS Zen Garden of yore. The latter was about fully redesigning a site without ever having to touch its HTML—only thing that changed was _a single stylesheet_. The former lets you redesign a site by altering all of its markup (while leaving the stylesheet untouched).

#webdesign

(https://jan.boddez.net/notes/4c66521fa2)