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• Post #3085761

  Rendering a chat thread in CSS and JavaScript: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/css-chat/ I want to add text conversation to my scrapbook of social media, so I needed to render text bubbles in a web browser. It was tricky but I got it working. Modern web tech is amazing! 💬 💬 💬

• Post #2901547

  Auditing my local Python packages: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/python-package-audit/ Recent supply chain attacks have me wondering “what Python packages do I have installed” – and virtual environments make that harder. I’ve started keeping a list of my environments so I can see exactly what’s installed, and where.

• Post #2901546

  Building a basic cache with SQLite: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/sqlite-cache/ I wrote about how I’m using a simple key-value lookup to cache expensive operations and dramatically speed up working on my website.

• Post #2901545

  Using Playwright to test my static sites: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/playwright/ I wrote about how I’m using Playwright to test my static websites from Python, the pytest fixtures I use, and a bunch of example assertions.

• Post #2427317

  Watching for file changes on macOS: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/watch-files-on-macos/ I wrote about my new Swift/Python scripts to get notified of file changes… without using third-party dependencies. I’ve got a Swift script that uses the FSEvents API to get notified of file changes, then I’m using stdout as a bridge to forward those notifications to Python.

• Post #1702024

  HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/python-http-with-the-stdlib/ For my local scripts I only need a handful of HTTP requests at a time, so I can do everything I want with a lightweight wrapper around urllib.request. Fewer dependencies FTW. 🥰

• Post #865086

  Creating a personalised bin calendar: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/bin-calendar/ I wrote a quick post about how I create my a fridge calendar that tells me about bin day. Python stdlib + CSS = 🚮 💚

• Post #486290

  How I create static websites for tiny archives: https://alexwlchan.net/2025/mildly-dynamic-websites/?utm_source=mastodon I wrote an in-depth walkthrough of the ideas and code I use to build small static websites: ✨ Splitting data and presentation ✨ Template literals to reduce repetition ✨ Filtering, sorting, and pagination ✨ User-visible errors when things go wrong ✨ Tests and other safety nets