Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 17, 2026

mtlynch.io

Published June 2026 retro
Dropped all twitter embeds
- Twitter is now blocking requests from CI, and I don’t want to bother with them anymore
Upgraded to Hugo 0.163.3
- I did this hoping the Twitter thing was just relying on deprecated URLs, but Twitter was indeed blocking the build
Resurrected my Oracle Cloud VM instructions
- I thought they were obsolete, but a reader pointed out that they still worked through an interface I couldn’t find before.
Tried switching from htmlproofer to lychee
- Still lots of failures, trying to integrate Common Crawl

Refactoring English

Worked on a new blog post called “Why I Stopped ‘Creating Content’”
Made a few small improvements based on reader feedback
Added a manual discount for Taiwan
- A reader emailed to say that PPP didn’t accurately match book pricing in Taiwan, where ebooks are typically more like $10 than $30
Improved formatting of my “new customer” alert emails to make it easier to copy/paste the customer name+email into a manually-written welcome email
Update layout for article cards to be wider on desktop
- Before
- After

Feedback app

Added a user list visible to admin
Disabled feedback on the Table of Contents page
Make it easier to review reader feedback
Tweaked UI for thread replies
Refactored the admin threads and reader threads views to share more code
Fixed a spacing bug when the reader comments on code snippets
Added handling for comments entirely on hyperlinks
- Clicking the comment highlight would also activate the link, so I added a little button after the text that shows the comment but doens’t click the link

Little Moments

Little Moments is an open-source web app I’m working on to replace the current family photo sharing app (TinyBeans) I used (which I strongly dislike).

Added a NixCI badge
Added support for video video uploads
- Starting with a half-working implementation
Re-do semantics so the code uses the term “images” and the UI uses “photos”
Added a unit test for unsupported image uploads
Upgraded Bootstrap to 5.3.8
Switched media variant widths to use uint32 instead of int
Switch convert package to be in terms of io streams instead of ever exposing file paths
Simplified the semantics for creating thumbnails
Make sure relative media paths can’t contain absolute paths
- And checked for other tricky path characters in other path types
Removed the imagepipe package, as it was a pointless layer of abstraction

go-app-starter

Backported a bunch of improvements from Little Moments and Refactoring English Feedback

aw-web-ng

Added a basic web frontend

mikeville

I started messing around with vibe coding a simple Stardew Valley-esque multiplayer game.
The single-player version worked fine, but everything started falling apart when I added multiplayer.
- I initially tried implementing multiplayer with Phoenix/Elixir, but it was super buggy, and I couldn’t read the code to figure out why
- I tried a re-do with Go, but it was also buggy and it was too much code to understand

Misc

Joined The TMPDIR podcast as a guest to talk about writing
Emailed an old co-worker
Worked with NixCI to find a solution to using NixCI as a binary cache
- This way, the AI agent can run the nix build before handing control back to me, and the result automatically gets pushed to NixCI so I don’t have to re-do the same tests in CI that I already did locally in Nix.
Retired the website for AllYourTexts
- It’s a Windows app I created 15 years ago and haven’t updated in about 12 years