It's been far too long since I shared an Eleventy tip, and to be fair what I'm showing today can be used anywhere, but hopefully this will be useful to someone else out there. I enjoy tracking my media consumption, specifically movies and books. For movies I've been real happy with Letterboxd (you can see my profile if you wish). For books, I used Goodreads for a very long time, but have wanted to migrate off the platform and switch to something else. There's alternatives, but none really worked well for me. Earlier this week, an old friend of mine (hi Jason!) suggested Hardcover. This is a Goodreads competitor built, in their own words, out of spite, and I can totally get behind that. I signed up and imported my Goodreads data in about five minutes and while I haven't dug deep into the site at all, it seems totally fine to me so I'll be sticking there. You can find my profile here: https://hardcover.app/@raymondcamden
As I continue to dig into, and learn, Astro, I thought I'd take a look at creating custom content collections. Content collections are pretty much exactly how they sound - collection of content items you can use within your Astro site. If you go through the excellent Astro tutorial you will find this discussed at the end in the final optional step step. Content collections aren't required - you can build dynamic sets of data just using file system operations (and that's how the tutorial has you build the blog) - but they make it easier (imo) to re-use content throughout the site.
As I think I've mentioned a few times already, I'm learning Astro and attempting to build random stuff with it just as an excuse to help practice and learn. With that in mind, during the Christmas break and between marathon sessions of Baldur's Gate 3, I built a little site I thought I'd share here on the blog. To be clear, this is nothing special, and doesn't come close to using all of the possible Astro features of course, but it was a useful coding exercise for myself and fun to build.
Welcome to my yearly "roundup" where I look back at my wins, accomplishments, and just about everything I did over the past year. As I always say, I assume no one really cares about this, but I like to take stock and honestly just remind myself of what I actually did. The years go by faster the older I get, but I swear they also feel longer as well. Of course, this year has been incredibly tough and that could account for that as well. Honestly, I don't feel like rehashing the bad stuff. If you read this blog on the regular, yall already know what I went through, and as I'm ending the year on a high note, I'm going to focus on that. I love my new job, I'm relatively healthy (if a bit more fluffy than I was last year), and I've got a lot to look forward to!
Every now and then I like to share my current tech stack, not that I think I'm doing anything special in my day to day, but I know I enjoy reading about other devs and their stacks as it's a great way to get introduced to tools I may want to adopt myself. As far as I can tell, the last time I did this was back in 2020 and things have certainly changed for me. So without further ado, here's what I'm using.
For the past two years I've done a fun little expirement - using GenAI to create illustrations from the Twelve Days of Christmas song. You can check out the 2023 and 2024 editions to see how things have progressed. In previous years, I mostly just kept things simple - passing only the day's gift as the prompt:
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