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Li Po – Heron Dance
I roam these mountains
Alive, alone, in love with life.
Strange to some, yes
I don’t try to explain
I can’t explain
The feelings I have here
In this land of no men
Of mountain ranges and rivers.
My mind empty, my heart free.— Li Po, Heron Dance translation.
chill-dogs
chill-dogs is a curated product site that helps dog owners find cooling and calming gear — from summer heat relief to anxiety-friendly comfort products.
Philadelphia to Los Angeles in Nine GPX Files
success
Explore the Journey: rt2026.benstrawbridge.com
In late January and early February 2026, my dad and I drove my 2008 Toyota Tacoma from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. The trip took 9 days. The odometer read 3,753 miles at the end; the day-by-day mapped dataset sums to 3,572 miles. I started this as a journal project, but as soon as I imported the GPX tracks it became a data project: route structure, speed regimes, and elevation signatures that are hard to capture in prose alone.
Obsidian CLI
The Obsidian CLI is here and it’s genuinely exciting for anyone doing open project management. Being able to script vault operations, trigger note creation, and automate workflows from the command line — without touching the GUI — opens up a whole new world of integration possibilities.
Beads and Gas Town: The Evolution of Coding Agent Memory
The landscape of AI coding assistants is evolving rapidly, and two recent developments from Steve Yegge are particularly interesting: Beads and Gas Town. These innovations address one of the fundamental challenges facing coding agents today: maintaining context and memory across sessions.
Deploying Hugo Websites to AWS CloudFront and S3 for Faster Content Delivery
A new way to deploy my hugo websites
A simple and cost-effective approach to deploying Hugo projects to AWS CloudFront.
I have and still do use services like AWS Amplify and Netlify to automate my CI/CD pipeline for many of my projects, triggered by a GitHub check-in and running in GitHub Actions. However, for a recent photography project that involved deploying a large number of files, storing everything in GitHub wasn’t feasible. I needed a solution that was simple, affordable, and delivered high performance. That’s when I decided to use AWS CloudFront with an S3 bucket, integrated with an SSL certificate generated through CloudFront.
Why AWS CloudFront?
Musical Genres
Every musical genre in my recent tracks. This page was generated with the Spotify API , please read our full disclosure on our use of this data.
Content Adaptor Projects
Content Adaptors come to Hugo!
A long anticipated release has come to the hugo static site generator that will be a real game changer. This is part of release v0.126.0. The new feature, called Content Adaptors allows you to generate static pages in your public directory at build time from a remote resource, such as an api.
Ingredients Section
Check out the new Ingredients Taxonomy pages
Using Taxonomy effectively
As part of the recipe template configuration being developed for The Ryder Theme for Hugo websites, a new taxonomy is created for ingredients. Ingredients are not the same as recipeIngredients; they are defined as an array in the front matter. I didn’t want a taxonomy page generated for every single recipe ingredient, so I created a separate variable. The recipeIngredients are used to display the ingredients on the page and for the recipe schema, ensuring the pages are properly displayed as recipe rich results in Google and other search engines.
Midori MD Dot Square Notebook
Easy going writing surface
This notebook has a flexible and strong spine and extra smooth paper that feels great for extended long hand writing sessions.
Buy Midori Notebook on Amazon.com
Tag Cloud
Cloudy days a hoy-hoy
I found this partial to create a tag cloud on Mert Bakir’s personal website and I have been adapting the code to suit my needs for this project, for now I’m just leaving it under this project page until I can decide what to do with it.
Recipe Template for Ryder Theme
Optimize Recipe Content with the Schema
The recipe templates for The Ryder Theme for Hugo websites are progressing well. Today I released an update that creates the schema.org json-ld specification tags for a recipe. This allows your recipe content to show up as “rich content” in search engines and social media platforms.