Pretty cool ideas here already!

I'm working on a subscription-based short-form video site called NICKEL[1]. I felt gross about using YouTube but wanted to share my gaming clips, so I made my own thing. Then I thought about making it sustainable so here we are. I'll have an update to the mailing list out in a few hours, I'm "building in public."

My feature-complete deadline is April 15th and I think I'll make it. If you want to check out the UI, visit the explore[2] page. I have it setup to redirect to a public video while I work on the intended UI (a design challenge I've never tried before but we've all seen). I'm thoroughly enjoying figuring out how streaming video works and how best to optimize things.

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[1]: https://nickel.video

[2]: https://nickel.video/explore

I just came across x402 recently and am excited to build upon it. My current project[1] will have a tipping feature and it'd be neat to give people the option to not use fiat.

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[1]: https://nickel.video

The problem with ASCII-driven development for me is that emoji ruin the alignment. It’d be nice if they could be forced into monospaced. Emoji aren’t ASCII so maybe that’s the problem too.

Seems like there's more going on with it than that, it's also affecting the lines that don't have emoji. It kind of looks like it assumes every vertical bar takes up two characters so a space before the bar is missing. Except not always.

Example 2 has five boxes in a row each with a number 1 to 5 in them, and each box is missing a single space before the second vertical bar... I think the problem might be centering, where it needs to distribute 3 spaces on either side of the text, divides by 2 to get 1.5, then truncates both sides to 1, instead of doing 1 on one side and 2 on the other. Doesn't quite fit with how many are missing in [PRODUCT IMAGE] right above that, though.

(Also I'm just eyeballing it from mobile so I may be wrong about exact counts of characters)

Unicode emojis aren’t ascii .

Long before Unicode points were assigned we were using emojis in text communication in email and sms.

you can always be quite expressive with ones like :) :D :-( or even ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - although not strictly ASCII.

Those are called emoticons, not emoji. "Emoji" came about specifically to distinguish the single-character ones (unicode or proprietary) from what we did before.

inb4 Anthropic acquires Opencode

I actually wouldn't be that surprised by this. I'd be more surprised at the OC people folding (not the right word, but you get it) on some pretty heavy ambitions in favor of an acquisition.

the right word, keeping with card playing and poker terms would be book a win or win the hand, scoop the pot

If you append ".txt" to any memo (post) or remark URL on my blog[1], you'll see a text-only version, formatted like an RFC.

This redesign is only a few weeks old. Previously, only the homepage of my blog was HTML/CSS, the posts were all text files by default. Most (all?) people were frustrated with the mobile experience but I loved it. I only redesigned because I wanted to see images on my blog again. You can see the previous version in the 2025 branch[2] of my repo.

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[1]: https://blog.webb.page

[2]: https://github.com/NetOpWibby/blog/tree/2025

Hell yeah! Just subscribed.

I want to add analytics to my blog too, haven't had any on my sites for about a decade.

Maybe a dumb question but why?

Im a firm believer that data collected that doesnt have a clear action associated with it is meaningless - and i couldnt think of an action i would take if my traffic goes up or down on my personal blog - but tbh i mainly blog for myself not really to build an audience, so our objectives might differ

It is kind of fun even if it serves no purpose. Like those end of year recaps by various services, "oh shit I played that much Hades?"

There are some actions you can take. For example, when my traffic plummeted, I saw through my logs that search engines were trying to access my search page with questionable queries. That's when I realized I became a spam vector. I gave a better rundown through the link I shared.

Same reason why people have personal projects and share them on GitHub, it's fun to see people using / starring / interacting with your project / blog.

Just an FYI, the data collected to make those conclusion was through the server log (Apache2 in my case). So if you run your own server or VPS, you already have this information.

If you want to count every search engine bot, AI crawler, vulnerability scanner as users then that works, but these days it's basically useless to use these web server logs.

Man, I really thought I’d be doing Cool Things at FAANG but startups are a lot more interesting and a lot less backstabby.

Sigh

Yep. I've done both now. Pay and perks are better at FAANG but the work itself is way more boring/annoying

I'm in a similar situation but I also have a direct report who is clearly displeased at the lack of leveling available to us. All I can do is empathize with them.

Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?

I could be entirely off base, but I would expect Android to be more likely to have more users that would go out of their way to use a non-default web browser, given that it seems to be favored by people who like customizing things. The relative openness of the platform invites a different demographic.

On the other hand, the default on Android is Chrome so there may be less motivation to change since it's the 'default' platform to target. But if Apple opened up iOS to other browsers, the likely outcome would not be Firefox gaining market share but Chrome completely taking over.

I do not like that iOS doesn't allow for alternative engines but I appreciate that it's basically the only thing that even somewhat reigns Google in.

I'm in this comment and I don't like it.