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
How this blog's content is accessed through Blogs Are Back.
Full Content
RSS feed includes complete post content for reading in-app
Proxy Required
Feed is fetched through our proxy for browser compatibility
Proxy Post Links
Post pages are loaded through our proxy for compatibility
Embeddable
Posts can be displayed inline in the reader view
Recent posts from alexwlchan's RSS feed.
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...
Parody posters for made-up movies
In my previous post, I needed a collection of movies to show off my CSS grid layout. The easy thing to do would be to use real movie posters, but I decided to have some fun and get a custom collection. I went to Blockbuster, HBO Max-Width, and Netflex, and this is what I got: In this post, I’ll explain how I created this collection, and why I spent so much time on it. Glossary of the Galaxy: what do the titles mean? Each title is a reference to a concept in CSS or web development: Apollo 1...
The Good, the Bad, and the Gutters
I’ve been organising my local movie collection recently, and converting it into a static site. I want the homepage to be a scrolling grid of movie posters, where I can click on any poster and start watching the movie. Here’s a screenshot of the design: This scrolling grid of posters is something I’d like to reuse for other media collections – books, comics, and TV shows. I wrote an initial implementation with CSS grid layout, but over time I found rough edges and bugs. I kept adding rules an...
If you enjoy alexwlchan, you might also like these blogs.
Seth Larson
sethmlarson.devPython security and open source infrastructure, plus retro gaming preservation and emulation.
Brain Baking
brainbaking.comWouter Groeneveld on software craft, philosophy, and retro computing.
Blake Watson
blakewatson.comSoftware engineer on web development, accessibility, game dev, and 20 years of personal blogging.
Maggie Appleton
maggieappleton.comEssays on programming, design, and anthropology
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.