alexwlchan
Alex Chan — Software developer and digital preservation specialist
Software developer on Python, digital preservation, and creative coding.
alexwlchan.netAlex Chan writes about digital preservation, accessibility, creative coding, and the quiet satisfaction of solving interesting technical problems. Posts move between professional expertise (they work in digital preservation) and personal reflections on inclusion, art, and the web — always with a generosity of spirit and care for detail. The site itself reflects those values: CC BY 4.0 licensed, accessibility-first, and full of small delightful touches.
Written by Alex Chan.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
0
Independent Blog
English
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Recent posts from alexwlchan's RSS feed.
Dreaming of a ten-year computer
I want my current computer to last for a decade. That’s an eternity in the tech world, far longer than most people keep their hardware, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable goal. Personal computers keep getting faster, but my needs aren’t changing. I use my computer for the same fundamental tasks I did ten years ago: browsing the web, writing, editing photos, running scripts, and building small websites. Today’s computers can do all that and have power to spare. You can still push their limits...
Gumdrop, a silly app for messing with my webcam
During the COVID lockdowns, I spent long evenings at home on my own, and I amused myself by dressing up in extravagant and glamorous clothing. One dark night, I realised I could use my home working setup to have some fun, with just a webcam and a monitor. I turned off every light in my office, cranked up my monitor to max brightness, then I changed the colour on the screen to turn my room red or green or pink. Despite the terrible image quality, I enjoyed looking at myself in the webcam as my ou...
The bare minimum for syncing Git repos
I have some personal Git repos that I want to sync between my devices – my dotfiles, text expansion macros, terminal colour schemes, and so on. For a long time, I used GitHub as my sync layer – it’s free, convenient, and I was already using it – but recently I’ve been looking at alternatives. I’m trying to reduce my dependency on cloud services, especially those based in the USA, and I don’t need most of GitHub’s features. I made these repos public, in case somebody else might find them useful,...
Creating Caddyfiles with Cog
I’m currently restructuring my site, and I’m going to change some of the URLs. I don’t want to break inbound links to the old URLs, so I’m creating redirects between old and new. My current web server is Caddy, so I define redirects in my Caddyfile with the redir directive. Here’s an example that creates permanent redirects for three URLs: alexwlchan.net { redir /videos/crossness_flywheel.mp4 /files/2017/crossness_flywheel.mp4 permanent redir /2021/12/2021-in-reading/ /2021/2021-in-re...
Swapping gems for tiles
On Sunday evening, I quietly swapped out a key tool that I use to write this site. It’s a big deal for me, but hopefully nobody else noticed. The tool I changed was my static site generator. I write blog posts in text files using Markdown, and then my static site generator converts those text files into HTML pages. I upload those HTML pages to my web server, and they become available as my website. I’ve been using a Ruby-based static site generator called Jekyll since late 2017, and I’ve replace...
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Follow alexwlchan
If you appreciate writing that's technically thoughtful and deeply humane — where a post about archival systems might sit next to a reflection on accessibility or a creative coding experiment — Alex's blog is a warm, careful presence in your feed.