Franklin Connors the original Bootstrap Cat
06/2008 - 09/2020
NOTE: most of this is going to be obvious to anyone who has current technology skills, for me there was so much learning in just throwing together this simple oldschool static site hosted by nginx. Most are observations around great improvements over Franklin's life ;). I wanted to write it down.
Installing SSL certificates went from taking hours to taking seconds. I had never used it before and WOW was it easy. sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d bootstrapcat.com -d www.bootstrapcat.com -d franklin.bootstrapcat.com -d www.franklin.bootstrapcat.com. WOW!
Surprisingly if I wipe my cookies and visit this page there aren't any on Safari, but there are three in Chrome from the Youtube Embeds (IDE, YSC, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE). IDE is a doubleclick tracking cookie. I wasn't too surprised to see cookies being set, but the inconsistency between safari and chrome is interesting. I was surprised to not see any cookies from instagram in either browser.
A while ago we made Franklin a FB page, today was probably one of the first times I've looked at it, but it was really nice to see all of our friends who had tagged photos with Franklin in them over the years. Downloading images was as simple as dragging them to my downloads folder. Whereas instagram does a bunch of funky stuff to mask images making this impossible to do. I'd expect both websites to be consistent in how they blocked or didn't block image downloads. This was surprising, and interesting.
I can now now use the mouse in VIM over SSH almost as if I was running it locally. This was likely improved a while ago, but was a welcome surprise.
On a whim I checked to see if this machine had a firewall on it. It didn't. Of course I just use it for a few personal projects and practically nothing is installed on it, but still. Installing ufw was super easy. OMG it's nice to know some basic security stuff has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years ;). I am fairly familiar with iptables, but on a vanilla machine it's typically a bit of work to configure with ufw it's trivial (the linked tutorial has some bugs, but it will get you started).
Treemaps are a way of visualizing data. While putting together this tribute, I ran out of diskspace a few times because I was messing around with videos, and had neglected to free up space generally. GrandPerspective remains my favorite method of figuring out what the heck is taking up space on your computer. If you are on a MAC, you probably didn't realize that some of the Mojave background images are taking up 1 GIG of space. See this Stack overflow article, turns out apple finally made it so you couldn't modify the system partition without rebooting in recovery mode, which is a PITA to delete Mojave desktop backgrounds that are eating up space, but a good move security wise. Good job team GrandPerspective who's software I've been using for many years and still works on modern OSes. Good job apple on improving security, even at the cost of making it more annoying to free up disk space ;)
Many people contributed to the slideshow, and anytime I needed to change music or add a new photo I had to rebuild the whole thing. (Yes I am aware there are many special tools for this). After rebuilding the video, I had to upload a new video to youtube which creates a new URL and update this website. I now understand why there are so many tools for embedding videos on websites, and why youtube is not ideal if you might need to change a video after publishing it.
Call me old fashioned, but I really expected emoji to be implemented as images given they are multiple colors. I bet most people already knew this, but given I haven't tried to add an emoji using code to anything for a while, I was expecting to need to download an image, silly me. ❤. Anyway they'll render in vim on OSX at least. (UPDATE: still was a PITA, even with emoji rendering in vim, I had to do some HTML entities and add a UTF-8 Meta tag to make them work, there are probably other options, but ended up not being as trivial as I hoped, likely due to not everything standardizing on UTF-8)
Franklin's tribute page deserved more than the default favicon. I was able to quickly take my new found knowledge of how emoji actually work in HTML/etc (they are a font), and do some quick google searching, and presto. (view the source of this page to see how it's done, it's pretty cool. The examples here didn't work for me without adding a font-family to the SVG.
I probably have never done this much writing in prose in VIM. Turning on spellcheck was trivial ;).
