Microblog (30)

Super excited that after a year of waiting, Remix v3 finally has a beta preview! I love how it’s actually a full-stack framework with libraries for auth, database models, s3, and everything else you end up assembling yourself.

Nextjs is a full-stack framework too, but it leaves a lot of the data-fetching and app architecture decisions up to you. That freedom is nice, but in practice every project ends up inventing its own stack out of a bunch of libraries.

Remix v3 feels more like Rails in a good way: opinionated enough to help you build quickly, but still composable enough that you can swap out their libraries when you need to.

I am a little surpised that there’s only discussion on Twitter. I was hoping to see more on Reddit or Hacker News.

The images in my “microblog preview” sidebar widget are way too big:

I thought it would look good if I put them inline:

I found my previous essay tool that I built over 5 years back.

IMO, the “repeated words” tool is the most useful, especially because it groups words like “organize” and “organized” as the same word.

The readability score would probably be more useful if done by paragraph rather.

Unique experience like a buffet, but you choose the ingredients and they cook them for you.

My high score is 4 plates in one sitting.

I like adding cheese to fried rice. Not many restaurants let you do that.

I wish we could’ve eaten together. They cook each plate live after you hand it over, so you and your friends end up eating in shifts. Someone’s always waiting while the others eat.

So far, everything’s been great with Astro. Great break from React. In fact, I’ve realized that only 20% of web dev I’ve done in my life ACTUALLY needs React. That being said, React’s component model was what kept me in, and Astro is similar.

Pinocchio’s is a small, cozy restaurant with great thick bread-y pizza. I enjoyed the pepperoni and mushroom slices.

It was so good that I forgot to take a picture before eating.

No bathroom in the restaurant, but they’ll give you wet towel packets to clean your hands. It was easy to get here by bike.

The Pesto Goat Cheese BLT is my favorite panini at Pressed. It’s a good mix of soft (tomato, cheese) and crunchy (bacon). All the signature paninis are good value: $12-16 gives you a large sandwich and a side, and a pickle too!

Pressed Cafe probably sits between fast-casual and fine dining. You order standing up, and then they bring the food to you. It’s a great UX compared to fast-food or fast-casual places like McDonald’s or Panera, where you order, awkwardly stand around for 5-10 minutes in everyone’s way, pick up your food, then struggle to find a place to sit.

Preview on Mac has a built in background remover. If it’s not in the toolbar, you can add it:

Next on my wishlist is a way to convert images within Preview. The option exists when you right click, but I’m lazy.

I want to start a mini restaurant blog on my site. I eat out a lotta nice places but when someone asks me for recommendations, I can’t remember any.

I’ll make it simple: make a micropost each time I got to a memorable restaurant. Purposely keep it unstructured so I don’t get lazy and stop updating it.

Just like window.localStorage, I wish window.globalStorage was a thing. An easy for way all apps to have a database. No need to set up a database, etc for every little app. Just ship index.html.

I haven’t really thought about how authentication would work though. Would each browser store data sandboxed by website under a unique ID? Would users have to authenticate somehow before using it? Who is storing this data, and where?

Okay, I see why this doesn’t exist. Yet.

Today I had to fill out this form for Boston’s Census. This website is probably older than me and the UI could be considered dated:

But it worked so well! I finished the form within 30 seconds. No random fancy autocompletes, no AJAX, no overcomplicated ever-engineered date pickers.

I guess the only issue is that it isn’t responsive.

A few years back, I had an idea to make a college essay analyzer. It would help you find duplicate words, read the essay out to you, help you find synonyms, etc. This was back in 2019, pre generative AI.

Out of all these tools, I think the repeated word finder would still be useful. It should not only work for exact repeated words, but also similar forms of the same word, like “thing” and “things” or “organize” and “organizing”.

What if we take LLM wrappers to the next level and skip the LLM API entirely? Your app is just two things:

• a website with a text box
• a publicly accessible docs link that the LLMs can read

The docs should explain what the LLM is supposed to do with what the user provides. The “message send” button just opens ChatGPT/Claude with a prefilled prompt.

I think this can be cool for smaller projects: no need to get an API key, worry about rate limiting, set up billing. But of course, projects like these will be more than a prompt that you are packaging in a slightly easier-to-use manner.

I wish the App Store was more open. To publish an app, you need to pay the $99 fee, buy a Mac, take screenshots/videos of your app, and then wait a few days for a review. Compared to the web, open an index.html, write your code, publish it wherever, and your site is live for everyone.

I know you can open websites on iOS, but it’s possible to create a much better user experience with mobile apps.

I really wish we could “sign in with ChatGPT/Claude” rather than having to pay for our users’ API usage. We kinda can do that if we make an open source project using the Codex/Claude agents SDKs, but it’s difficult for non-technical people to use those.

I’ve been trying to make this mini version of Hyperlocal agent and test friendly. One way is by making all storage and state live in the URL.

I just asked Claude Code to “test Hyperlocal as a non-technical user … make a Boston day trip plan”. The best thing was that it just shared the URL of the map it made, so it was easy to debug.

And of course, building for agents means you’re building for humans. Good DX for agents = good DX for humans.

I wish it was easier to make “self-editing” HTML files. I should be able to have a single HTML file, open it, put text in the inputs/textareas or wherever, save it, and have the HTML file itself update with that content.

Chrome gets close, but if you open a regular HTML file directly as file://, you don’t get file system access. You have to serve it from localhost/HTTPS instead of just opening the file.

I was trying to make a micropost for Hyperlocal, and my own CMS blocked me from doing so because the image was too big! I don’t remember asking my agent to do this, so I was impressed, but annoyed too. One prompt later, and I added client-side image compression. I might spin this into its own tool.

Trying to make a simple tool to “revive” Hyperlocal. It should work in the browser without any signups or database. Someone should be able to open the page, map out a few points, lines, areas, and share the link.

I got a basic version working. Users can add points, lines, name them, give them colors, and find their addresses.

I’ve always wanted a map app that’s like Google Docs but for maps. I started Hyperlocal but didn’t go that far because most people didn’t understand what it was trying to solve. To be honest, I think it’s trying to solve a laundry list of slightly related problems too.

My CMS is pretty good! It’s nice that I can make “one-off” edits for things that are useful to me. For example, in my micro blog, I have threads. Managing threads was annoying on mobile, so I added a thread viewer on the side.

If the microblog post is a part of a thread, it shows you all the posts and makes it easy to continue that thread!

I got a simple media editor for my CMS working!

You can upload images, then click them to copy the markdown image syntax like ![](/images/media-editor-demo.png).

On iOS Safari, I cannot have my login details remembered, so I’ll have to enter my password every time. I can’t seem to get Safari’s password manager to work with this either, so I might have to think of another simple way to have “just for me” auth.

Basic auth works great! Only thing, I wonder if I can save my auth state and not have to enter my username and password every time. I remember iOS Safari having issues with this.

Having a text-only CMS is easy, but I really need the ability to upload and manage images. My current image storage is pretty well-defined: this microblog post is in /content/microblog/2026/{slug}.md, and its images will be at /public/images/microblog/2026/{slug}/. Let’s see what Claude can do!

Turns out, it was not difficult to make a CMS for my blog. I got a super simple file editor. Now the next step is to make sure that only I can access the CMS. I was thinking of using Better Auth with a D1 database, but basic auth might work better since there’s only one user (me).

Editing my own website has always been a pain. I’d have to open my laptop, open my editor, remember how I structured my blog, write markdown, preview it locally, push, wait for it to build, etc.

I think it’s time to vibecode my own CMS. It’s probably gonna become a maintenance nightmare, but let’s see.

I’m switching my personal site from Nextjs to Astro. I’m taking a break from React, ShadCN, and Nextjs.

With everyone arguing about Nextjs and Tanstack Start, I wonder if Astro is the best “one-size fits all” option. Built in content layer, Astro actions, caching, SSG, and SSR. I’ve been having a great experience, and it’ll likely dethrone Nextjs as my default framework.

I recently found out about Pi, and immediately tried to use it to make a “personal assistant” with memory.

It was a lot of fun: I made it monitor GitHub issues and work on tasks I gave it. I also gave it a phone number from agentphone.to so it could call me. I was able to call it, tell it to make edits to itself (for example, add a memory layer with markdown files), and have it call me back when done.

Only issue, Pi does not have a native built in solution for web search like Claude and Codex.