I’m sitting here writing this on the couch of the in-law suite at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in St. George, Utah. Now that is a sentence I never would have guessed I’d be writing last year. Honestly, it’s not even a sentence I think I could have guessed I’d be writing back in April. But here I am. That feels like as good a place as any to pause, look forward, and write down a few goals for 2026. I’m a firm believer that growth without goals is mostly accidental, and I’d like to be a litt...

I just merged PR #21 into django-blog, adding first-class h-card support across the app. This is part of my slow march toward more semantic, IndieWeb-friendly markup without bolting on heavy third-party tooling. This change is mostly invisible from a UI perspective, but it adds a lot of structure under the hood. What’s an H-Card? An h-card is a microformat for representing a person or organization in HTML. Think of it as a lightweight, standards-based alternative to things like JSON-LD for b...

If you’ve ever built a Shopify app, you already know that webhooks are at the heart of the platform. Everything from orders and fulfillments to customers and subscriptions fires through them. But actually testing Shopify webhooks during development can be exhausting. You either need a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint, a tunnel that loves to break at the worst possible moment, or a staging environment just to debug one handler. Triggering real events from the Shopify admin is slow, unreliab...

I recently started my journey of rebuilding this blog using Django. It's a learning experience for me, with the side benefit of nudging me to write more. Something I wanted to add was some super basic analytics to help make sure this site is actually being used by someone other than me. I wanted to see things like a (somewhat naive) count of unique visitors, total page views, where requests were coming from (both referrer and geographically), and response codes (mostly so I can find 404s). Th...