Dan's thoughts on web and game development, tech experiments, and whatever else catches my attention in the Golden Valley.
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👋 Well that was a longer break than I intended, about four months since the last weeknote. Things got busy, and the longer you leave it the harder it is to start again. Anyway, I’m back. 🔧 Spent a couple of evenings getting the site updated to Hugo 0.164. Mostly template stuff, the summary partial, RSS output and tag taxonomy all needed reworking, but it’s building cleanly again now.…
🌐 Rebuilt my API this week using Laravel. It was raw PHP before and I needed some of the useful tools Laravel gives me. It didn’t take that long once I got into it, a lot of the code was easily transferrable. 💬 I then added in the bit of functionality I setup the IRC server for the other week, a button on the bottom of my blog posts that sends a message to channel when someone clicks it…
I built a website that eats itself. You visit doom.haus , twelve images get picked from a pool of about nine hundred, seeded by the timestamp you arrived. Then over the next hour the whole thing rots away - noise chews through the images, little particles fall off like ash - and when it’s done you get a black screen and an epitaph. There’s no pause option or save button, you can only…
🫐 I’ve been working on a few projects this week, but mainly the Hackberry Pi CM5. 🚀 I’ve been working on my own custom launcher for it written using Ink - react for terminal application! My first real go at using it. 💬 Switching from Soju to The Lounge resulted in me needing to rewrite my IRC interface for it, and I ended up reverse engineering the socket interface on The Lounge and…
🐇 This week I ended up making a static site deployment tool - avalanche , but that wasn’t the original plan… 💬 It started off with an idea that would require my own IRC server, so I set that up. 🏠️ It needed to be public, so I figured it would need a homepage incase anyone stumbled upon it. 🤬 I had ditched GitHub in favour of self-hosting all my git repositories, so the old way I…
🕸️ I took a little break from Tiddler and went back to another old project, a tool for scanning a website and then suggesting common IndieWeb tools and patterns - scan.fyi 📡 The technical parts were pretty simple, I had the main gubbins of a passwordless authentication system already written, I wrote a blog post about that yesterday . 📄 Currently it scans for the easily identifiable…
Most web applications ask for your email address, then store it in a database alongside your password hash, your profile, your activity history. They promise to keep it safe. Sometimes they don’t . When I built scan.fyi , I wanted to authenticate users without ever knowing who they are. No passwords, or usernames, or plaintext email addresses. If the database were ever breached, an attacker…
🎣 I am still fully consumed with building my cosy fishing game, Tiddler. 🗺️ This week I spent most of my free time fleshing out the small maps for the game to make them more interesting. 📦 I also researched a fair bit about the wild fish I didn’t know much about. I’m not going for realism but enough to make it believable… 📕 The Fishing Log/Encyclopedia has had a full…
I’d not really had any experience with Tiled but when I found out about it, it seemed like a great choice for having quick and transferrable map editing that I could then apply into Godot. As I started building out the maps for Tiddler I found myself wanting to scatter a lot of decorative objects around - rocks, plants, props, ground variation - the kind of thing that makes a map feel…
I should preface this blog post by saying that prior to this I had no real knowledge of shaders in Godot, or shaders at all. Every solution I came up with here was through trial and error and almost certainly is not best practise and should not be taken as such. I am just writing it down here so I can remember what I did next time… Do not take any of this advise and do not use these methods…
🌊 I started the week not knowing much about Godot Shaders. I still don’t know a lot but through mostly dumb luck I managed to produce a pretty cool (in my opinion) water shader for my fishing game. I’ll do a full post about it soon. 🎂 It was my birthday on Monday, a quiet affair all in all but that is how I like it these days! We had cake. 😵💫 The absolute madlad over at tabf5 on…
Since actually finishing and releasing Whittler a few weeks ago I’ve been thinking hard about what kind of game I want to make next. I’ve got a massive list of projects I’ve started and not progressed with, ranging from a nature game with a fully generative forest that spawns trees based on moisture levels, soil quality and terrain height through to an underground cavern…
👾 Spent a decent amount of my spare time this week working on my next game, a cozy fishing game. 🎣 I’ve got a good number of the core mechanics in place, including: The main fishing game A day/night cycle and lunar cycle both impacting fish availability and their difficulty to catch A weather system that also affects fish, and a weatherman who gives a 5 day forecast A guild NPC who sells bait…
My set of Badgeware badges arrived this week and I wanted to take a minute just go over unboxing and my initial thoughts. You’ve already had the spoiler; I think they’re pretty cool. Set of three Badgeware badge boxes What are they? Made by Pimoroni here in the UK, they are smart badges that run MicroPython and have a little battery onboard, with WiFi and Bluetooth too. They come in three…
🎮 I actually released a game! You can play it right now . ⚖️ During the finishing up stage I realised how hard balancing something like this is, there are over 7,000,000 skill unlock combinations. I wrote a simulator at one point but it was going to take a very very long time sim all the possible combinations. 👾 One of the most fun parts of making the game was right at the end where I decided I…
🎮 Wrote the majority of a game engine for choose your own adventure style text based games. It has some useful feautres like sharing game states between multi-chapter games. 💭 Put a lot of thought and a bit of code towards the first game for this engine, it’s called System Shutdown: 1999 and is based mostly in BBS forums. 🌧️ Had a ridiculous amount of rain this week, no flooding though…
🗨️ Added the ability to send and receive webmentions to the blog. ✉️ Received an actual real life email from Dan to let me know he had sent the first one and it wasn’t showing up, so I had to rush out the code to actually display webmentions, too! 🧰 Setup a little personal API to handle the guestbook, visitor counter, and aforementioned webmentions. 📺 Setup a dashboard on my homelab for…
This post contains large GIF files, apologies. A passing comment resulted in me falling down a bit of a rabbit hole recently. I couldn’t find a GIF of one particular line from 1999’s The Mummy . The line is “apparently he had a very good time” and it was perfect for the situation at the time… but it was nowhere to be found. Fast forward two days and I had hacked together a script that would accept…
I’ve seen a lot of these popping up around the tech space and find them very interesting to see what tools and apps are peoples go-to for various every day things. Apparently there are over 500 posts and counting! Here’s mine right now: 📨 Mail Client - Proton Mail 📮 Mail Server - Proton Mail 📝 Notes - Notes.app ✅ To-Do - Notes.app 📷 Phone Photo Shooting - Camera.app 🟦 Photo…
❄️ It’s been pretty cold and we’ve had the lightest sprinkling of snow. 🏠️ We’ve started getting the house ready to go on the market ahead of a move this year. 📱 I did a mobile pass on some of the pages on this website, it works a bit better on phones now. 🟠 Added the resources section with a script to pull weekly last.fm stats (see example output below!) 🆒 Started working on…
Quick note: This isn’t an “AI bad” rant. AI tools are a useful thing to have in your kit. This is just an observational look at what the data shows about StackOverflow’s decline. That being said, the sooner the AI bubble bursts the better. This post was inspired by a post on Hacker News that linked to this StackOverflow data . My kneejerk reaction to the data was that the…
🎆 Happy New Year! Last year went by shockingly fast, and the year ahead is looking very exciting too. 💻 The Thinkpad T480s arrived and has been suitably sticker bombed. I am running Pop!_OS 24.04 on it and everything so far seems great. 🌐 I setup a dedicated server for this site and migrated off neocities, I am coming up with a plan on how to make sure updates keep getting posted there but…
🎄 The family had a good Christmas, the kids enjoyed it and that’s the main thing! We went to my parents for lunch, but the littlest one was without a nap so we were home by 3ish and he had an early night. 🎁 I got a Wiim Ultra for my bedroom headphone setup, I’ll post more about it at some point. 🧑💻 I’ve been running Bazzite on my main desktop for a few weeks now and…
Welcome to my Bloggish! Here I am going to post weekly updates in the way of shortform notes, but without any strict rules on what I can and cannot include in them. There may be links, videos, photos etc. There may well be other, non-weekly, updates and posts with larger topics covered. A few of the ideas I have for posts so far that I want to add: My hugo build and deploy script for Neocities…
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/building-a-website-that-destroys-itself/"https://ritual.sh/blog/building-a-website-that-destroys-itself/doomhaus_hu_240a593946f7a434.png")
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/2026-03-14-week-12-hackberry-pi-cm5/"https://ritual.sh/blog/2026-03-14-week-12-hackberry-pi-cm5/2929_hu_1b856a6d9f4d3d7e.jpg")
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/2026-02-22-week-9-game-dev-and-a-lot-of-homelabbing/"https://ritual.sh/blog/2026-02-22-week-9-game-dev-and-a-lot-of-homelabbing/fishinglog_hu_9536514322276a9a.png")
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/tiddler-dev-blog-3-tools-for-tiled/"https://ritual.sh/blog/tiddler-dev-blog-3-tools-for-tiled/foliage_hu_67ee190b17c967e9.png")
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/tiddler-dev-blog-1-making-a-plan/"https://ritual.sh/blog/tiddler-dev-blog-1-making-a-plan/tiddler-1_hu_2dc28fc451e2ba4d.png")
![](https://ritual.sh/blog/badgeware-2350-are-pretty-cool/"https://ritual.sh/blog/badgeware-2350-are-pretty-cool/images/DSCF3545_hu_a00c08438f25a3.jpg")
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