All posts274
Shake Your Phone, Startle the Meerkat →
A ninth easter egg for this blog, built for readers on a phone: shake it — in Chrome or in the installed PWA — and the meerkat mascot takes over the full screen, startled, for about two seconds. Covers the devicemotion 'jerk' math behind shake detection, the three-phase overlay animation, how to test it from a desktop DevTools console with no accelerometer at all, and a real bug caught along the way — an AI image generator that drew a transparent-background placeholder as literal opaque pixels instead of real alpha.
August 27, 2026 · 13 min read
Your Blog Is Unreadable to an AI. Here Is the Fix. →
A growing share of your readers arrive through an AI assistant — and what they get is your HTML, wrapped in navigation, React widgets and collapsed accordions. This article generates a plain-Markdown mirror of every article, a /llms.txt index, and per-series full-text bundles, by degrading the MDX source rather than converting the rendered HTML. Includes the fallback rule that makes the export impossible to break.
August 24, 2026 · 9 min read
AnythingLLM: Chat With All Your Scattered Documentation →
AnythingLLM turns a pile of Markdown, Quarto, PDF, DOCX, Excel and PowerPoint files into something you can actually chat with, backed by a local Ollama model. Part 1 sets it up on a single machine; Part 2 keeps the documents on my work PC while borrowing the GPU sitting at home.
August 17, 2026 · 27 min read
ai-review, ai-secrets, ai-commit: Three zsh Checks Before Every git Commit →
Three zsh functions that together form a local, offline pre-commit quality gate: ai-review catches SOLID violations and naming issues, ai-secrets separates real hardcoded credentials from false positives, and ai-commit drafts the Conventional Commits message once the diff is actually clean.
August 10, 2026 · 9 min read
ai-test: Generate Missing Unit Tests From Your Terminal With a Local LLM →
Turn your local Ollama model into an on-demand unit test generator. A zsh function that reads a Bash, PHP or Python file, detects whether you already have tests for it, prints only the missing Bats/Pest/Pytest cases needed for full coverage, offers to save them where the framework expects them, and runs the suite in a throw-away Docker container.
August 3, 2026 · 13 min read
Adding Reader Reactions to Your Docusaurus Blog →
Build a fully working "Was this article helpful?" widget for your Docusaurus blog. Step-by-step guide covering the PHP backend, React component, CSS module, Docusaurus swizzle, and an admin dashboard — everything you need to reproduce it from scratch.
July 27, 2026 · 20 min read
AI-Powered Code Tooltips in Docusaurus — Explain Like I'm Five →
Add hover tooltips to tricky code lines in your Docusaurus blog — powered by Claude, generated at build time, zero browser latency. Covers the remark plugin, the React renderer, and the CLI script.
July 20, 2026 · 18 min read
Meerkat Mischief: Sprinkling Easter Eggs Across my Blog →
A tour of eight small, discoverable easter eggs added to this Docusaurus blog — a hidden ASCII-art meerkat in the page source, a Konami-code sprite run, a console.log wink, a tab-away favicon swap, rotating 404 messages, a hidden sitemap comment and more — plus the real bugs (key-repeat, an AZERTY keyboard mismatch, a wrong emoji, a postBuild race condition, a blurry favicon) caught along the way.
July 13, 2026 · 12 min read
ripgrep — The Search Tool That Changed My WSL2 Workflow →
Discover ripgrep, the blazingly fast grep alternative written in Rust. Installation on Ubuntu/WSL2, ZSH configuration, practical shell functions, and real-world use cases that will transform how you search code every day.
July 6, 2026 · 12 min read
git worktree: Work on Two Branches at the Same Time →
git worktree lets you check out multiple branches as real directories simultaneously — no stashing, no context loss. Keep your Docker stack running while handling hotfixes in parallel.
June 29, 2026 · 10 min read
Bring Your CLI Tutorials to Life with a Typewriter Terminal →
Add a typewriter animation to your Docusaurus Terminal component — command lines typed character-by-character, output lines appearing in sequence, with a blinking cursor and a click-to-skip escape hatch. Three new props, zero breaking changes.
June 22, 2026 · 9 min read
delta: a Syntax-Highlighted Pager for git diff →
Stop squinting at raw git diff outputs. Learn how to install and configure Delta to add syntax highlighting and side-by-side views in under 5 minutes.
June 15, 2026 · 7 min read