Blocking entire countries because of scrapers
I use Goatcounter for analytics primarily to see where things I post might get mentioned. I don't get a ton of traffic, nor should I expect to.
Cory Dransfeldt
Posts
These are all of my blog posts on this site (I like some more than others).
I tend to write about whatever strikes me, with a focus on development, technology, automation or issues I run into with these things. This is all typically light on editing with and heavy on spur of the moment thoughts.
2025 in review
This year has, to be frank, been exhausting. At least in a macro sense. It feels quite like the United States is collapsing as fascism and kleptocracy continue to take hold. Institutions are being turned inward to attack the most vulnerable, corruption is rampant, the economy is sliding and we're only a year into this nightmare. I'd say look to the midterms, but who the hell knows if we'll even be able to vote by then.
Using Calibri on .gov sites
The US government is run by petty morons that are threatened by a font. But because the web is the web, you can at least force .gov sites to render all text using Calibri.
App selection criteria
The last app I bought through Apple's app store was a client for my Audiobookshelf instance and this reminded me why I'd built a Navidrome client. I wanted to use the web application as a PWA, but Apple doesn't support continuous audio playback in PWAs or Safari on iOS. Audio plays, but it never advances to the next track.
Building my Myspace
I mentioned on Mastodon that my wife lovingly (and jokingly) refers to my site as my Myspace. She's always right and this is no exception.
Turning my reading list into podcasts
linkding is one of my favorite applications that I self-host and the place where I save everything I want to read later. The catch being that what little time I can dedicate to actually reading is spent on books. What I do have is time where I can listen to things while doing chores around the house, out on walks or otherwise engaged in an activity that doesn't demand my full, undivided attention.
Deploy on push with Forgejo and Coolify
All of my projects are now stored on my Forgejo instance rather than GitHub as the latter continues to speed run the enshittification curve. I've implemented a manual deploy button in my site's admin but for other, lighter-weight projects, I prefer to deploy changes whenever I push them up.
My default apps, 2025 edition
An update on my 2024 post. Some fairly major changes this time around. I've been making a concerted effort to move to more self-hosted applications and, failing that, hosted applications built with privacy in mind. This has also been done with an eye towards relying on fewer Apple services.
Automating my reading progress updates
I've tracked my reading progress on my site for a bit now. I'd originally done this by fetching my progress from external APIs and sources on platforms like Oku, fetching and parsing the DOM on the StoryGraph and eventually importing and managing my own data. For years I've been reading and listening to audiobooks in Apple's Books app. Much like Apple's other media apps (music and TV, namely), Books has slowly moved in a direction that makes impor
Updating forgejo's robots.txt
I've moved all of my personal, private projects over to my own forgejo instance. It's been reliable and an altogether simple transition — I even have it mirroring the ai.robots.txt repo.
No JavaScript necessary
One of my ongoing efforts in building this site has been to embrace progressive enhancement and make it every bit as functional without JavaScript as it is with JavaScript. This has become much easier now that I've rebuilt the site using Laravel.
AI browsers are straight out of the enshittification playbook
Enshittification isn't cliché, it's simply pervasive. Browsers being launched by AI companies will, undoubtedly, follow the same playbook we've seen over and over again.
A Flock of prying eyes
The city of Camarillo (where I live) is planning to install 15 new Flock ALPR cameras, bringing the city's total installed base up to 20. The city is adding to a surveillance network that has already been abused and misused by agencies across the country.
Evolving my personal music scrobbler
I've nearly entirely rewritten my site over the past few months. First, I refactored the frontend into a Laravel application that leveraged the same postgREST endpoints that my long-running 11ty site used. Next, I wrote a new administrative application in Filament and migrated off of Directus. If I did this right, the changes went largely unnoticed.
Analyzing the domains (and sites) of an authoritarian regime
If you've ever wondered what domains the US federal government has registered, there's a rather exhaustive list over in the dotgov-data repository on GitHub, which is maintained by CISA. You can see the raw CSV here. They don't include the registration date, but you can derive that from public WHOIS records or by examining the repository's git histor