My larger chunks of time off tend to be the time when I also get a lot of self-admin and personal projects moved forward. This year was no exception.

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I’m running Staticman for comments on this blog. If you’re using the main/public instance of the app, this requires you to add Staticman as a collaborator to your site repo, which I decided I’d rather not do… so I’ve run up my own instance of the application, and this is a quick look at how I did it.

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Despite the fact that I’m not really a front-end dev, getting threading to look decent was not the hardest part of this.

I’ve been wanting to set up Staticman on this site for a while. I took a swing at it a year or so ago, but either because I was less experienced with working with webapps and I was insisting on running up my own instance, or because it’s in Node and I’m a Ruby dev primarily, or because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up adding Disqus to the site, but since they just got bought and I have no idea who the new owners are, I’ve finally gotten around to setting up Staticman. There is an excellent post on Made Mistakes about this that I’ve cribbed a lot from, but there were a couple of gotchas I ran into that took me a while to solve.

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Turns out Disqus just got bought, and considering I know bothing about Zeta Global (sounds sinister though), and since I was already kind of on edge about Disqus’ privacy stuff, I’m killing the comments on this site.

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About 3 years ago I took my first stab at creating this website. It was part of my work in General Assembly’s Front-end development course, which was one of my intros to development (the other being Harvard’s free intro comp-sci course, CS50, which I can’t recommend enough). The thing that I really wanted to have on here was search for posts, without any backend functionality. This meant JavaScipt, and man was it friggin’ ugly.

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I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table a lot recently. It’s an actual play podcast run by a team of amazing people where they play different tabletop games. They have a focus on “critical world-building, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends” (to quote their strapline) and they do all three really, really well. I’ve just finished the first two ‘seasons’ of their show, and I’m super excited to pick up with the rest.

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This game is really thoughtfully designed, and I’m going to hack the shit out of it.

I’ve been struggling to juggle the many background criminal, political, and other mysterious factions I have in the roleplaying game I’m running, set in a very political industrializing republic. There’s a lot going on–the PCs are very much a small team in the face of everything happening, and I want the world to reflect that very strongly.

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I am so excited to play this game.

I’ve recently discovered the Powered by the Apocalypse family of RPGs and they look great. It’s been a long time since I got this excited about finding new tabletop games.

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I was out sick from work a couple of days this week, and I found I was starting to get depressed. Turns out it was because I was sitting on my butt for so long.

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This release patches Nokogiri CVE-2017-9050 to protect from Denial of Service attacks.

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