How I Built One Dashboard for All My Self-Hosted Services
How I built fzlaunchpad: a fast, YAML-configured dashboard that puts my self-hosted services and their current status on one page.
The archive
15 articles on engineering, tools, the web, and the ideas around them.
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How I Added Self-Hosted Comments to My Static Blog
How I added Google-authenticated comments to an Astro blog with Remark42, Docker, a dedicated comments subdomain, and Traefik.
Running split DNS at home with dnsmasq
How to resolve the same hostname locally at home and through a public route outside, using dnsmasq on a Raspberry Pi.
A professional email address on my own domain—for free
How I connected Cloudflare Email Routing, SMTP2GO, and Gmail so I could receive and send mail as contact@afzalex.com without paying for a hosted mailbox.
How I Made My Static Website Form Send Real Email
How I connected a static website form to a verified inbox using a small Cloudflare Worker, Turnstile verification, and an Email Service binding.
Cloudflare Turnstile: A Smarter, Free Alternative to CAPTCHA
How Turnstile protects web actions from automated abuse with less friction, and why its server-side verification matters as much as the visible widget.
Pulling the backup home
What I learned while replacing a server-driven push with an automatic Ubuntu-to-Mac pull, and the small details that made it reliable.
The quiet craft of writing on the web
Notes on publishing slowly in a fast medium, and why the open web still rewards patience and care.
In praise of the narrow column
Why measure, that simple, ancient typographic constraint, is still the single most important decision on a reading page.
Field notes from a small harbour
A week of walking, reading, and watching the boats come in. What slow places teach about attention.
Building tools that disappear
The best software for thinking gets out of the way. A short meditation on restraint as an engineering value.
A conversation with a bookbinder
On hand-stitched signatures, the smell of linen thread, and what a centuries-old craft still has to teach the rest of us.
Writing against the algorithm
A short argument for publishing in places that don't optimise for you, and for readers who arrive on purpose.
The grammar of good buttons
A button is a sentence. A short one, in the imperative. Here is how to write it well.
What I learned from a year of walking
Three hundred and sixty-five days, one slow route, and a small notebook. A report from the pavement.
