From My Desk

About a month ago I was notified by Linode that my server had been compromised and was initiating a DDoS attack out to the internet. Of course they don't take things like that lightly so the server was suspended, and after many hours of diagnosing and trying to find the cause, I found nothing :sad_face:.

Welcome to yet another unboxing and review of a model in my stash. This time we looking at the Das Werk 1/35 Kugelpanzer, a 2-kit combo pack. Let's get started.

Welcome to yet another unboxing and review of another classic car, the Volkswagen Beetle

Today I want to discuss something important to most websites, analytics, and why I chose not to go with offerings from Google.

Welcome back to another unboxing & review of a model, today we are looking at the IBG Models 1/35 BMW R12 with sidecar - military edition.

Welcome to another unboxing video, this time we are taking a look at the AMT 1/25 1935 Chevy Bel Air, a classic American car.

It's that time of the year again, time for another yearly roundup of what I have and haven't done. I wish I could make excuses on why this list isn't as great as it could be but really at the end of the day, it came down to sheer laziness and honestly a pretty deep bout of depression. I don't really want to focus on my professional side this year, mostly because there isn't much that happened there, but that doesn't mean I didn't work on any skills that would be beneficial to myself in the year to come either.

Welcome back everyone! Time for another semi review! See what I did there har har.

I'm guilty. Last week I was working on my website on my laptop and testing as I went, but I was only running in dev mode, and it bit me in the butt. I had finished up a major refactor of my react-query hooks and types and all looked good, so I git pushed my code, and on my production server pulled, built, and restarted my app. And then I found out it didn't work! Very quickly my website crashed because I didn't account for something in my code that would affect the production build on my website and because my laptop also stopped working had no live website for days!

Welcome to the new year everyone. Let's hope that 2021 turns out to be better. of course, nothing changes overnight but we can all hope! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season but without further words, let's get started!

Hello once again from the keyboard of Chris. It's been a minute since I've done a blog post and a lot has happened to cause the gap, I shall explain why in a bit. I hope everyone has been doing well, surviving the COVID pandemic and healthy sitting at home. I've been gone for a few months now, mostly due to depression, there is no lying about it and I'll be upfront.

Welcome back to the first 'Month in Review' segment I've done in a while now. I'd had a lot happen in life and like some people lost my mojo for a while just due to frustration and burn-out but Its time to hit the editor fast and hard again. I've been dealing with a lot of authentication issues on the website, something I've been struggling with for months now and have reached the point where I think its best to rip it out and start fresh.

Today I thought I'd do a quick little post on using absolute imports with Next.JS as recently I was getting tired of the way I was including files. What am I talking about? The way I had it in code previously was:

Today I spent a little bit of time doing something that benefits everybody. I know a lot of people probably won't know what I'm talking about since I've always had SSL on all my sites for your protection, but I'm talking about the TLS version I'm running. Over the years there have been many versions of encryption methods to secure your communications and what you are doing on the internet from ISP's and other spying eyes, but they all eventually succumb to attacks or just become weak to powerful computers hardware.

Maybe you've noticied. maybe you haven't but there has been a distinct lack of me around here for a while now. Why? Well, I can make up a bunch of excuses but the sad reality is I lost my mojo for the site. Working on the authentication has been a real challenge and has, for the most part, defeated me and made me question how I want to go about this if at all. I think the problem merely has been a case of I'm not sure how to do it right, securely and it's frustrating me.

Howdy, everyone, it's Chris. I thought I'd take a bit of time and review my previous year, what I accomplished and what I hope to accomplish in the coming year. But rather than do like I've done on month in review posts I thought I'd start out with the personal side, talking about relationships and things I've done non-professionally for once. If you're ready to let's get to it!

Welcome, all to yet another month in review segment! Boy have things progressed nicely this month on many fronts! Let's not waste any time and get to it!

What's going on everyone It's Chris once again coming at you with my 'Month In Review' segment. What have I been up to over the last month both professionally, and personally are talked about in this bit? Without further ado, let's get started!

What's going on everyone, its that time of the month again. Let's dive right in on what I've been up to over the past month both professionally and personally.

The last couple of days I was doing some profiling of pages on my website, seeing where and how I could optimize and cut down on bundles to improve the user experience and noticed something that when I started thinking about it made no sense.

Welcome to the first installment of what I'm going to call my month in review segment where I'd like to just take the time to talk about things that have happened both on my website and in life whether hobbies or otherwise. Let's not wait and dig in shall we? First I'd like to talk about the status of my website, where I'm at with it, what I'm working on etc.

Today I'd like to talk a bit more about visual identity and what I'm working on with the site. One of the biggest things that's driven me nuts lately about where I'm going with the direction on the site is visuals, everything to me was starting to look the same and I needed a way to bring some interest and change so that while the overall color theme and styling is the same, there is some individuality of the different sections of the site. An experience tailored to each thing.

Today the one thing that I'd like to discuss is design, and consistency of it. When I started out on the rebuild I had a visual target to achieve, that of the old website, but I also wanted to refine and change things that didn't make me happy as well. But the problem is, I made everything look alike! No matter where you look its the same and thats becuase I'm not much of a designer and thats something I'm hoping to address before too long, whether it be solicit advice online, hire someone, or just keep doing my things and pray. The real issue though? With the migration to styled-components and the ability to break up the CSS into components i quickly found myself rewriting CSS over and over for different thngs that were visually the same and that lead to inconsistencies within. I've begun the process of combining down similar components and migrating the CSS into more specific components rather than overall in different places. Sidebars for example.

So let me start with a pre-face on why this came up and how I worked it through till I finally came up with the rather hacky solution that works! One of the goals with my new website was to build a dedicated models page. A space where I can show off the work I've put into building models over the last few years, but also make it easy enough for visitors to my site to be able to navigate and sort and search for what they want to see rather easily. Basic things that all kits have in common are the grand, the scale, if they are completed or not (some are still in progress), and tags that i've added. As time has gone on many new ones have been built and I needed a way for users to narrow down their search results as well, say you want a specific brand in a specific scale that isn't done. My first pass through was to just add dropdown boxes with all the options possible (populated from GraphQL queries) and just push the new URL with that one variable changed. It worked but you could only select one thing, not more, that presents a problem with trying to sort down to specific subset. From there I began researching the best method to handle this mult-sort. I knew I wanted to build a function that could be re-used wherever routing was in place on the page so that everything could take advantage of it, but the implementation details I wasn't sure on.

So I thought a good place to begin my new blog was on a topic that is pretty important to this website and its functions, the tech stack used, both hardware and software and services used.

Welcome to the first blog post on my new website! Why the title though? Well because simply it is humble beginnings. This is now the third or fourth iteration of my website, none of which I have ever been happy with but today, today I feel like I'm going in a great direction. For once I feel a great sense of accomplishment, pride, and overall enthusiasm about my new brand and look. But wait you might ask! Didn't the old website look exactly like this? Yes, yes it does, with minor tweaks here and there of course to accomodate the new tech being used but otherwise its the same old familiar look. Coming from WordPress and not feeling like I had total control over everything to now with Strapi providing the backend technology and extensive use of Facebooks React and many other awesome tools I for once feel like I'm in charge. Truely in charge at that. One one hand this new setup is so much more complex, and some day I shall delve into that and how I've gone about building my new website but today I just wanted to basically say hey. So I guess without further adu: