TrickJarrett.com

The Trap is setup again

A few weeks ago I posted about setting up a forum for this blog as an experiment. A perk of no one reading this is that when I screw up, no one notices.

The Trap existed but never really worked. I was testing things out and just let it fall off. Today I moved to phpBB rather than the forum tool I had been experimenting with, and in doing so have the first iteration of the forum's automated posting made. When I publish a new post that has its own page (rather than just existing in the date archive) it will automatically create a post on the forum.

It's not perfect. It runs by having the forum pull my RSS feed, which it does every 30 minutes. Additionally, this means there is no way for me to let the blog know a forum link, so I can't link to the forum discussion automatically. Yet.

But, since no one is here, I get the joy of just futzing around at my own pace.

The other screw up no one noticed was that single pages for entries weren't publishing at all. I implemented some code behind the scenes and I totally screwed it up. So it was making every single entry page just blank. And I only noticed it, today, after a few weeks of this issue being live, because I was messing around with The Trap forum.

I've updated my 'How to use my blog' entry

Microfeatures in Blogs

Came across this delightful blog entry which shares some items that Daniel, the author, enjoys seeing implemented on other blogs. For ease of reading, I'll reproduce the list here, but do go read Daniel's post:

• Aside links in larger articles
• Tables of Contents (also calling out displaying page progress)
• Linkable Headings
• Multipost Grouping
• Dialogue blocks
• Code blocks crediting origins/sources
• Markers for external link
• RSS Feeds
• Links to other sites/blogs

I loved the list and have already made some notes for Glowbug (my own blog's engine) implementation. Their inclusion of "Markers for external links" also made me happy given this blog's already implementation of showing linked domains, et al.

I already have an idea for an on-page progress bar. My idea is to add the ability to seen previously seen on the progress bar. Specifically if scroll down a page, and then back up, it should keep the furthest you've scrolled visible and just change that color so signify it isn't currently seen. I don't have time to hack on it this morning, though I might try to get it done tonight before I fly out tomorrow.

Multipost Grouping is something I technically have implemented on the back-end, but haven't really used, and also isn't quite the implementation the author was referring to. My implemention was a thing I called 'chapters' and comes from an old idea I had years ago for a life-blog which let me write entries into chronological "chapters" to capture eras in my life. This concept came about when I was younger in my 20s I think, when my life was somewhat more likely to change. The reality is I also don't tend (at least, currently) to write posts which are grouped in any way other than tags.

I am definitely going to add capabilities for Dialogues to my blog. I don't regularly need them, but agree having them would make the blog better.

My daily automated post potentially includes links to other blogs if they are posts I add to my Wallabag to read later. I like the concept, and the idea I've come up with is a "starred reading" functionality for the blog, where it is posts I've read recently on other blogs and want to recommend in an ongoing fashion. I've added it to my backlog, we'll see if I implement it or not.

Jason Kottke's 52 things he learned in 2023

A look at how the list starts. Quite a few interesting things here.

1. Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
2. “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
3. Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
4. More than 100,000 public school students in NYC [were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.](were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.)

...

Migrated post: Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)

I was reminded I never migrated this post from my Wordpress blog. Here it is, if you're curious for my writing in response to Bourdain's passing.

It's wrong to call myself a fan of Anthony Bourdain. That overstates it. I read Kitchen Confidential and enjoyed it. When I watched one of his shows, I enjoyed it. But I didn't seek his content out, I didn't wait for news of new seasons or projects. But above all, I held jealousy of the career and life he had. It is a romantic way of life.

The vision of traveling the world to eat food and experience life around the world. I've been able to see many places around our world, and yet there remains a whole world that I haven't seen yet. What I've done is a step more than most people, and those places I have seen have confirmed this famous quote by Bourdain.

Small Glowbug Updates

I've been making some small updates to Glowbug (the engine under this blog.) Nothing major, but a few small things recently.

First, I made it so the system can automatically give image uploads a random name without me having to do anything before uploading. This also works for the system where I have it able to download images from the Internet for local hosting.

Second thing, which I did today, was that I modified the Markdown parsing to apply the caption text for images. Not only as the accessibility 'alt' text for images, but also so that the text will appear when images are moused over.

No More Newsletter

When I moved my blog to Glowbug, I envisioned an email newsletter automatically going out. I never got to an automatic email, it was a nightly (or morning) routine to send it out manually to my list of... four subscribers.

Each of them were personal friends who had signed up for this list years ago when it was something completely different. (Thanks to each of you, by the way.)

However, I am not dedicated with the blog to merit really continuing to push and try to make it a thing. So I'm officially pulling the plug on the blog's newsletter feature.

Maybe one day I'll start it back up, we'll see.

That Time Topher Grace Backed Me Up

My usage of Trick for my name is sometimes not obvious to folks. This is one such example of the realization happening a few years ago on Twitter. An acquaintance had it click and I provided the background that I had been inspired by Topher Grace for it. And then the legend himself backed me up.

Good times.

New Newsletter Name

As has been an important highlight for the last few days, the newsletter I send out has been on my mind. Right now it has the self-titled subject of "Trick's Words." But I decided I wanted to give it a better name. I brainstormed on it a bit and came up with two ideas:

Bits & Blips

I like this one because it has the alliterative title. And Blips was one of the original things as I built this blog engine, I called entries blips. Because the original vision was to be entirely a link blog, so blips would encompass the short entries in the same way 'tweets' (and now 'toots' and 'skeets') are entering common language.

The Daily Trickster

Gives it more of a newspaper feel and it still incorporates my name while perhaps also allowing me license to have a bit more fun in the newsletter.

We'll see. Still mulling these over and how I feel.

Update: I've landed on calling the daily update emails 'Bits & Blips' moving forward.

I am still waiting for evaluation on the blog's newsletter account to be cleared so I can resume sending it out. If they don't approve it soon, then I will go ahead and begin moving over to the other platform simply out of a desire to be done with it.

Update: And just received the all-clear. Incoming double newsletter delivery.

Another party with extreme gezellig

Every year we host two events, a 4th of July BBQ and then a Christmas party. Today was the BBQ and it went fantastic, as always. It's such a wonderful social event. At one point, as I was grilling, I just sat on the edge of my porch and listened to all the people chatting - basking in the awareness of the event around me.

It's one of my favorite times during the year and it truly fulfills the feeling of gezellig in me. I feel so content and so happy and so fulfilled from these gatherings.

Looking forward to Christmas.

You can now buy me a coffee

Without any real goal, I have started a 'Buy Me a Coffee' should any readers feel inclined to support my writing. I don't drink coffee, so I need to modify the "Buy me a [blank]" to something else. I currently have it as 'Buy me a book' but I'm not sure if that is what I want it to be.

Sometimes your blog breaks for no reason

I don't know why.

A few weeks ago, I rewrote how the blog generates what I call the "link tails" which is when a link is followed by the (domain.com) information. It was originally part of the publication of the blog and thus embedded in the html files directly. But then I decided I wanted to move it to be javascript.

Honestly... I'm not sure why. I had a reason. I'm sure of it.

In any case, it wasn't working today. I'm not sure what happened, but it appears to be an issue with how I was filtering the links. Not every link on the blog gets a tail. Only ones which go off the blog (so no trickjarrett.com tails) as well as no links in the sidebar.

And something stopped working with that such that no links were getting tails. I did the filtering a different way and it's all fixed.

Also it looks like there was a reversion of the CSS file. I'm not sure why, but something got lost and I had to recreate a bit of CSS. My best guess is that I accidentally overwrote the site's CSS file with a local copy which was not the most recent, as I sometimes tweak the CSS file on the server. Oops.

In any case, it's fixed now.

Edit: Regarding Wikindle project

It finished running overnight. I spent a little while coding a cleanup function which scans downloaded files and removes ones I don't want. This is one of the features I mentioned wanting. So I've got that figured out. And it blacklists articles so I don't re-download them in the future.

I started working on having it generate cross linking between articles, but there were enough bugs that I stopped and decided to come back to it.

For now, I consider the project done and stable. There are improvements, but it's time for me to move back to working on the blog and on Behemoth.

I ended up crashing and crawling into bed around 7:30 last night. I knew it was early and I was worried I'd wake up at midnight or 1 and not be able to fall asleep, but my body was just exhausted and I decided to risk it.

The gamble paid off. I quickly fell asleep and even though I did wake up once during the night, I was able to immediately fall back asleep. Nine hours and forty-ish minutes, with a sleep score of 76 from my smartwatch.

I still feel some soreness from working the event, but I feel much better rested and ready to take on the day.

How to Use My Blog

A blog should be user friendly. I want people to enjoy reading my blog. But I also want my blog to have a lot of fun gadgets and be a means for me to express my creativity and love of programming. These things can be in opposition at times.

This page is my effort to catalog and provide some useful signposts to help folks get comfortable and better parse through this archive of mine.

Search

In May 2025 I implemented site search. It searches both posts on this blog, as well as my social archives from X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. The X archive includes a number of now-deleted posts from over the years.

Headers

1. If a link in a header is in quotation marks, it signifies my titling matches the article's own title at the time of publishing. All other link titles are editorialized by me.
2. I also add a few icons to header links: The page icon signifies an internal post which has its own page rather than just being something embedded in the daily archive. There is also an icon flagging when I'm directly linking to a PDF.

Reviews

Review posts for media get a score out of a 5 added to the header, what that scored "item" is is purely done for entertainment purposes. I just find it more enjoyable than just saying "4/5 stars."

In 2025 I began using Radar charts to share movie ratings.

Archives

The Date archive page uses collapsible headers, clicking (or tapping) expands or collapses them. When you get down to the month view and it lists out days. Any posts which have their own actual page, rather than just existing within the date page, are also shown on that view.

There are heatmaps, inspired by Github, showing post frequency for each year in the archives. This heatmap is also visible on the frontpage in the sidebar. Clicking any colored square will take you to that day's archive.

Link suffixes

My blog automatically adds flags to links, most notably is it showing the domain. It also adds a flag when I am linking to a domain which is known for paywalling. Trying to save people clicks when they don't want to be surprised to face the paywall.

Those were the items I wanted to explain off the top of my head, I'll see what other tips come up and I'll come back to update this.

Behind the Scenes

The blog is written using my own homebrewed content management system named Glowbug. It is written in PHP and Mysql. I have no plans to ever make it public for two reasons:

1. It is far inferior to other options out there.
2. It has far too much me-centric stuff in its design.

Posts on the blog are largely written using a tweaked Markdown syntax.

I've introduced a few tweaks of my own:

1. Links enabling mouse-over text.
2. Image URLs allowing me to assign classes to the generated image.
3. Other custom embedding functions such as for videos, movie information, etc.

---

Change Log

• June 9, 2023 - Initial posting
• June 24, 2024 - Updated layout and added features
• Nov. 5, 2024 - Added backend information
• May 31, 2025 - Updated contents, including adding information about searching

Not sure what is going on with the newsletter function for this blog. Not sure if it is a problem on my end or on Tinyletter. I'll have to look into it later.

Update (31 May)

I am not sure what happened yesterday with the newsletter. I hit the button to generate the email and the way it works is I get an email that the newsletter is ready and to reply to send it. I did, and as I did, I got another email that the newsletter was ready. And another. All in total I got six emails. And, the one I had replied to so that it could send ended up being the newsletter from the 24th. As it turns out I did also get the newsletter for yesterday so i could send it out, but yeah - something funky was going on with tinyletter. We'll see how it performs today.

If it continues to behave erratically, I'll need to finally transfer over to a new email newsletter platform. We'll see!

Every knob one person touched from June 3-4, 1999

I continue to dip my toe in using ObsidianMD as a larger writing tool for myself. I've begun using it for archiving writings by others, interview and podcast transcripts, etc., for organizing and building a reference library on various topics.

I'm wondering, since both this blog and Obsidian make use of Markdown, if there is a use case where it would be useful to save my daily archives also in a markdown format which is easily importable to my Obsidian for search and reference. I think the answer is yes.

If so, then it becomes a question of best implementation. I already maintain a backup of my Obsidian "Vault" as it is called online, so it's about publishing the day's document to that location, and then syncing my laptop and phone to pull in the recent updates. That can be done easily enough manually, but of course I am interested in automating the process.

This also calls into question if I should enable a reverse setup. Perhaps retiring the web interface I use for managing this blog, and instead do my publishing via Obsidian. The downside there is when I am away from the computer, where the web interface enables me to publish easily from anywhere and on any web-connected device.

Edit:

Second idea, whenever I star an article in my Wallabag (Pocket-like tool for reading articles later) I should automatically export them to my Obsidian as well as something for future reference.

Sounder at Heart survived SBNation/Vox's massacre

Layoffs are never fun. SBNation shut down all but two MLS blogs (as well as the entirety of their NHL blogs) and with a few days perspective, Jeremiah Oshan posts about the future for Sounder at Heart and admits to the survivor's guilt that comes with being one of two MLS blogs which were spared the hatchet.

US soccer coverage is going to look very weird and I hope another enterprising group picks the various blogs up, or at least steps in to continue to provide coverage for the other teams.

YouTuber shares the nitty gritty on his income from the channel

This was posted in October but I only just came across it:

I started Brick Experiment Channel in December 2017 and got accepted to YouTube Partner Program in June 2018. Now, October 2022, the total earnings are 664 thousand USD. That is 12500 USD per month. This is the money Google sends to my bank account, from which I pay taxes.

Brick Experiment Channel total: subscribers: 2.9 million video views: 705 million uploads: 65 total earnings: 664 000 USD avg earnings per month: 12 500 USD RPM: 0.94 Playback-based CPM: 3.20

So, over five years, it has averaged out to $132,800 a year, though the actualities of that number are likely more of an exponential pay out curve rather than linear.

The 5% rule - no matter how nice you are, some people are just jerks

This entry rang a chord with me. My dad had a story he told (and told and told and told over the years.) His first job out of college was about selling for a chemical company, and he was told by one of the more experienced men:

There are five people in the world. One who - no matter what you do or say - will always buy from you. One who - no matter what you do or say - will never buy from you. And three which can be swayed by what you say or do. So your job is to focus on those three.

This rings similarly to the blogpost.