There, I said it. We’ve all been thinking it, maybe for years, but it’s finally happened. YouTube as we know it is gone.

I’ve just published a new software package on Github and NPM called test-ease which is ready to use if you need a simple, straightforward, lightweight testing framework. I think this is going to be a great solution for testing small and medium software projects, and I plan to use it in a couple of other projects I’m working on now. In fact, that’s why I wrote it.

I’ve been playing Blades in the Dark with my family and some friends this year, and it is a ton of fun. I’m sure you’ve heard of Dungeons and Dragons, probably the most iconic entry in the tabletop role-playing category — Blades is a little like that. The gameplay is a bit simpler, using only d6 dice, and the world is much darker and more supernatural-oriented. That’s not to say it can’t still be lighthearted, though.

Moving from WordPress to JAMstack has been an interesting journey, although not nearly as challenging as I expected. One of the migration tasks that did give me a little trouble, however, was setting up a custom 404 error page.

WordPress has been a wonderful CMS for my website these past few years. I’ve enjoyed working with it, I’ve learned a ton from it, and I’ve developed a deep respect for its power. For the right website, it’s a fantastic publishing tool, and I’m sure it will be for years to come. However, at least for this website, my time with it has sadly come to an end. I just don’t need most of the features it provides on my small personal blog/portfolio, and it’s been time to upgrade to a better hosting situation for a while.

For a couple of months I’ve been getting a trickle of badly-put-together (but frustratingly well-spoofed) extortion spam at my main website e-mail address.

Yes, the custom lightbox plugin I developed for my website’s photos page is finally officially released! It is lightweight, functional, nice-looking (in my opinion at least), and it even does a little trickery when the page loads to make it a bit harder for visitors to download copies of your images.

For some time I’ve been noticing a strange issue on my website: every once in a while, a file named error_log would appear in a subdirectory of my document root, visible to anyone who knew to look for it. It seems that whenever there was a PHP error (for example, when a vulnerability probe tried to access a theme file), PHP would dump the error message to a file in that same directory.

Now that my website redesign is complete-ish, or at least launched, I’m starting to work on cleaning up and releasing some of the custom code I wrote to make it happen. This is one of those pieces: a tiny, lightweight plugin that removes unneeded stuff from the head section of each page to make everything a little more lightweight, improving loading times, bandwidth usage, and site security.

I’m very excited to announce a new version of my website! This has been a very long time coming, but I have finally redesigned it in WordPress and added a bunch of new content. It will be a lot easier for me to add more on an ongoing basis too, and I plan to write blog posts every so often about my software projects.