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I'm getting the hell out

I’ve reached a breaking point with where Big Tech is taking us. I’m getting the hell out.

Exporting As Many of Your Twitter Bookmarks As Possible

Twitter Bookmarks were first introduced in 2018 , and ever since, Twitter has treated machine-readable access to these bookmarks like they’re pushing vegetables around on their plate. The export available from your “Twitter Archive” doesn’t include your Twitter Bookmarks (likely in violation of GDPR), and official API access to Bookmarks only started in March of 2022 .

How To Download a Manuscript from the British Library

Flexible Passwordless Rails Authentication with devise-passwordless

For PodQueue , I wanted users to be able to sign up with just an email address, instead of having to also pick a username and password at sign-up time. You’ve probably seen this strategy with some other online services like Slack, where the login process can be handled by a so-called “magic link” that gets emailed to the email address associated with your account, and clicking the link logs you…

Using a Rails App Layout with Jekyll

There’s a number of different strategies you can use to host a blog for your app or company, and for PodQueue I went with the tried-and-true “ static Jekyll site on a blog subdomain” approach. There are tradeoffs to every approach, and one here is that I initially ran the blog with a generic Jekyll theme just to have something up and running. I wanted the blog to instead have the same styling and…

Gnom. Vat.: English Translations from the Gnomologium Vaticanum

Printing Public Domain Books on Lulu

I’ve been interested in printing my own personal copies of some public domain works for a while with a print-on-demand service, and wound up wanting some printed copies of the reference edition of Stobaeus for reading and working with. This seemed as good an opportunity as any to finally try my hand at it, and I went with Lulu since I had purchased some books for sale there before, where a seller…

PodQueue: Giving Back to Rails with rails-hidden_autocomplete

Generating Static Error Pages with Rails

For PodQueue , I wanted to generate static error pages that used the same Rails layout and branding as the main site, and while there are many approaches floating around for this, none quite worked exactly the way I wanted them to (or at all) with Rails 6 and Heroku.

Removing "?ref=producthunt" from your search results

After launching PodQueue , I submitted it to many of the usual product launch sites, including Product Hunt . In submitting PodQueue, I set the webpage to be “ https://podqueue.fm ”, which Product Hunt turns into the outbound tracking link “ https://www.producthunt.com/r/f179c9b85faf16 ”, which in turn resolves to “ https://podqueue.fm/?ref=producthunt ”. Fair enough, I could do some…

PodQueue: How We Deliver Blazing Fast RSS Feeds

Using Rapporteur with source versions on Heroku

Rapporteur is a nice simple gem for adding a status endpoint to your Rails app. It also has support for including the source version (e.g. git commit) in the status response. While the docs suggest using ENV["REVISION"] for Heroku, I found that wasn’t set automatically in my Heroku runtime stack.

Going Cookie-Free With Rails

For PodQueue , I wanted to be able to respect users’ privacy by only even setting a first-party cookie when we absolutely had to. As it turns out, this can be a little confusing in Rails, since by default Rails wants to store the session as a first-party cookie on every response. It also uses this session data for things like CSRF protection on form submission, and for storing/displaying flash…

PodQueue: The Missing "Let Me Add That to My Playlist" for Podcasts

I’m happy to finally announce that registrations for PodQueue are now open!

Recovering From a Kernel Panic During Initial FileVault Encryption

After upgrading my iMac (late 2013, and thus T2-chipless in case you have a T2 chip and the behavior is different for those models) to macOS Catalina 10.15, I noticed that I needed to re-enable FileVault encryption for my startup disk. Soon after doing so, during the initial FileVault disk encryption step, my iMac reported a kernel panic and shut down.

Diagnosing Rails 6 Deprecation Warning "Initialization autoloaded the constants"

If you’ve upgraded an app to Rails 6 with the new Zeitwerk autoloading mode , you may have encountered a deprecation warning like the following, particularly when you run your test suite:

Testing a Rails Release Candidate

So, you want to kick the tires on a new Rails release candidate to check out new features, give feedback, and see what the upgrade will be like for your app?

Dropping JavaScript Console Output in Production with Webpacker

Want to avoid embarassing JavaScript console output in a production Rails app that’s using Webpacker?

Latin Names of Libraries Commonly Used in the Naming of Manuscripts

Often when working with Greek & Latin texts, you’ll find manuscripts referred to using Latin names which indicate where the manuscript is currently located. For example, “Escorialensis Ω.I.12” refers to a manuscript with the shelfmark Ω.I.12 in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, Spain. Unfortunately, the list of names used is quite extensive and this can be a somewhat confusing…

Rails 6 Parallel Tests with Webpacker

I recently switched a project over to using Rails 6’s built-in parallel tests , by setting parallelize(workers: :number_of_processors) in tests/test_helper.rb