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Eleventy Rewrite + Netlify

Hey there! Long time no see.

I've been super busy doing stuff that isn't working on my personal site that I've not had any time to update it whatsoever. But since it's the holiday season and I have some time, I figured I'd rewrite it in Eleventy. Turns out it was super easy to convert from Metalsmith to Eleventy, thanks to the static blog starter. It did a huge amount of the work for me. Over the next...whenever I can make time for it.... I'll be updating the styles to not look like the site was... Read More

GW2 Assistant Update

So! I've not actually posted about this, but I've launched a small iOS app GW2 Assistant.

Since then, we've had some issues with the local cache never clearing and the app not updating data. Because of those issues and the fact that Ionic 3 is hitting beta shelves, I'm in the process of completely rewriting the whole thing. This time, we're using redux to pass information around and persist - and leveraging some of the new quirks of Ionic 3 to hopefully tamp down on some of the issues. Stay... Read More

Site Now in Metalsmith + Let's Encrypt

Metalsmith Rework

Permalink to “Metalsmith Rework” # I recently got the bug to try something new and run my site using a static site generator instead of Drupal. There are several reasons: I wasn't really using any of the features of Drupal, and having a static site committed somewhere made more sense. I've been writing more and more JS things, and since PHP is my day job I thought it'd be nice to have something else. Metalsmith had been brought up before, as had Hexo and a couple of others... Read More

Why you should write in Markdown

What's all this then?

Permalink to “What's all this then?” # I had a bit of free time this afternoon, and decided I should take a moment to talk about one of my favorite things: Markdown. In the post, I'd like to talk about what I've been using Markdown for and a few of the services and tools I've been looking at and using. Hopefully it'll be useful! Markdown is awesome Permalink to “Markdown is awesome” # Let's get this disclaimer out of the way up front. I <3 Markdown. I use it to write... Read More

Techlahoma Chat Bot take 2

So it has been a while since I first talked about creating amandaharlin_v2, and I figured it was time for an update.I originally spun up _v2 on Digital Ocean (which is what is hosting this blog), and everything worked out pretty well.

However, this left some things to be desired, as I was the only one in control of the server, and since I wasn't using any kind of node process manager. If irc would disconnect for extended periods of time, or the node process would die for any reason, I'd have to... Read More

Techlahoma Chat Bot

Today while I was talking in #techlahoma, the topic of chatbots came up. Being something of a chat bot connoisseur, I (with @amandaharlin's blessing) have set out to tell you how to get your very own hubot up and running on IRC.

First, let's talk briefly about my chat bot history. I've written a Python chat bot from scratch to connect with an XMPP server. His name was kittenbot, and he was awesome. As a result, I got very familiar with XMPP's XEP-0045, which is the specification for multi user... Read More