mastodon
4.6.5
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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!
💬 💬 💬
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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.
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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.
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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.
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red Maaaaybe?
I see Transfer-Encoding: chunked mentioned in the docs for urllib.request, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever encountered a chunked response in my scripts.
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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. 🥰
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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.
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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 = 🚮 💚
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
Writing software · Stitching embroidery · Making tiny magical worlds · Doing digital stuff in cultural heritage · Genderfluid shapeshifter
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