Hall Pass is my semi-weekly newsletter where I combine a bunch of smaller topics into a larger post in between higher-effort articles.

Topic One: Cooler design!

I now own a really awesome piece of software by Serif called Affinity Designer. My school provides free Creative Cloud to all journalism students, however I got worried that I couldn't own the copyright to my images were I to use it. So I purchased Affinity Designer, and haven't looked back. It's amazingly fast and responsive even on my five-year-old silver iMac.

Rest assured, my future posts will be more visual and interesting, starting with my upcoming post about signage and poster design and why people keep on screwing it up.

Topic Two: How do I build a community?

This blog has existed for maybe four weeks. I have two "members." I don't know how to grow that, because I don't know people that would be interested in what I have to say. Who wants to listen to a teenager rant in deranged fashion about tech and design? Raise your hand if you do. Anyway, what sort of content do you want to see? You can email [email protected] with any suggestions for something that would float our mutual boat.

Topic Three: Hey you! Nerd!

Cookies begone.

I switched from Cloudflare Analytics to an open-source analytics system called Umami that I self-host. You know what that means? No cookies! No tracking! Just sweet, sweet pageviews.

This means no cookie notice, no GDPR violations, no BS. The only cookies my site will ever store is if you log in by becoming a member. Hint hint. I don't believe in tracking my users across the web, so maybe I'll have no idea whether you specifically decided to sign up for some stupid blog on the internet.

The Node.js Production Stack

Hell yeah! My prod stack is 100% pure Node, and that makes me really happy. As the only language I can currently understand, it holds a special place in my heart. It makes sense, and it's very fast. I'm proud of my little Raspberry Pi. Yes, this site is hosted on an RPi. The one part that isn't Node is probably MySQL, but no one cares about MySQL. Go back to your corner.

Argo Tunnels

These things are seriously cool. Say someone doesn't want to host a website or service directly from their home's external IPv4 address. This person wants to have a website without paying like $8 a month to some random hosting company. The solution is Argo Tunnels, a Cloudflare product, that is essentially a reverse proxy into my server.

Software is installed on the server that basically lets Cloudflare reach their large, orange hands into the network, they take what they need, and leave. That's a very simplified explanation, sorry. Below is the full thing: