Work by Christian Taylor. An artist & full stack developer based in Wichita, KS.
Moonbase Labs shrunk to two people. I'm both uncomfortable and excited about what next year will bring. Twitter imploded this year and I've become more active on Bluesky . I only wrote one blog post this year - yikes - I really was planning on writing more. I published my first and only YouTube tutorial ; it has earned 2700 views and I now have 101 subscribers. I continued to maintain Alpine AJAX…
The "Now Playing" component on my homepage features the last five jams I've been jamming to and updates in real-time as I play music. Here's how I made it and how you can build one for yourself: I listen to music mostly through Spotify, but the Spotify API requires a complex OAuth authentication process. To make things easier I created a Last.fm account and setup Spotify Scrobbling from Last.fm…
Moonbase Labs stuck around for another year, work was steady. This was my first year in a while that I've only worked for a single organization. Last year Friendship Lamps by Filimin sold to new owners and it felt like a good time to sunset my work on that project. I built an electric vehicle fleet management tool for Lightning eMotors , we've already seen a few competitors in the industry copy…
I’m going to walk you through how to easily add an instant search filter in your Laravel apps. When I say “instant search” I mean a text input that filters a list of results as you type. In this tutorial we’ll build out a basic contact list and then allow a user to search for a contact by name or email. We'll build the "search as you type" behavior, without writing any JavaScript, using the Alpine…
I added image support to my Eleventy website. I was looking for a solution that would automatically take a lot of the grunt work out of preparing images for the web. When it comes to images, there's actually a lot to consider: You should serve images with the correct dimensions so they don't get distorted You should use srcset & sizes attributes to load different sized images based your user's…
At about the same time I started a design refresh on this website, Zach Leatherman launched WebC , it's a small compiler used to author websites with single file components. I'd been feeling NPM-dependency-hell-burnout lately and was looking for a way to simplify my website's tech stack and return to good 'ol plain HTML & CSS; Eleventy paired with WebC felt like just enough abstraction without…
I manage several websites hosted on Digital Ocean through Laravel Forge . Recently some unusual traffic on one of these websites prompted me to setup some Cloudflare security features. Cloudflare required that I migrate my website's DNS from Digital Ocean onto their platform, and this required some additional tweaks to settings within Laravel Forge and Digital Ocean. I'm going to document my…
I had to go through some trial and error to get this working so I'm writing it down. My goal was to permanently redirect a domain like beta.imacrayon.com to imacrayon.com in Laravel Forge. In order to properly redirect https://beta.imacrayon.com . I generated a new LetsEncrypt certificate with the following domains: imacrayon.com,www.imacrayon.com,beta.imacrayon.com Next I added two new server…
I came across a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave at an annual conference for the American Psychological Association in 1967. I was struck by just how relevant this passage is right now: Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The…