01 — Category
Notes from the workbench.
Build is where I keep the design, build, ship and improve loop for the services I make under Aulvem, plus the technical notes and coding basics that came up along the way. Honest about what got stuck, what was actually used, and why.
To send Web Push without accounts or email, you have to decide what holds the recipient before you send anything. Here is how an anonymous device token, minted into a cookie and delivered from Cloudflare Workers with VAPID over webcrypto, handles subscriptions, revocation, and the iOS and FCM gotchas that only surface on real devices.
Rakuten's item search API never returns the JAN barcode, while Yahoo! Shopping looks it up directly via jan_code. Building a cross-marketplace price watcher on that asymmetry, I split product identity into three certainty tiers — JAN match, name fuzzy match, no match — with the scoring weights, thresholds, and the notification rule that keeps mis-merged items from firing alerts.
Building a price watcher on my own, the calculation I underestimated most was 'display price minus the points you earn'. Splitting reward points into three certainty layers (confirmed, conditional, assumed), flooring each layer before summing, ranking on the confirmed layer only, and why shipping stays out — the design decisions I landed on, with code.
How I generate llms.txt and llms-full.txt as Astro API routes, driving them from Content Collections and splitting English and Japanese with two axes — filterLang (which posts to include) and docLang (the document's own language) — plus how it sits next to robots.txt.
Astro's i18n routing doesn't emit hreflang on its own, and a naive 'always emit all locales' implementation points at 404s for one-sided posts. Aulvem uses Content Collections helpers to emit alternates only for languages that actually have a published entry, then handles the reciprocal and x-default rules on top.
@astrojs/sitemap doesn't read updatedDate from MDX frontmatter, so Aulvem builds a path-to-date map inside astro.config.mjs with fs.readdir + lightweight regex and feeds it into serialize. Paginated noindex pages are also filtered out.
How Aulvem pushes blog operational rules into the Zod schema in src/content.config.ts. .refine() ties two fields together, howto/faq objects keep structured data typed, and a grep validator covers what Zod can't reach.
Aulvem runs on Astro 5 + MDX + Content Collections, with operational rules enforced by a Zod schema and rehype plugins. A map of the stack and the pieces that hold it together.
Part 3 of the Figma basics series. Walks through registering and applying color, font, and effect (shadow) styles, then combining components with variants — the next step up in making a design file easier to maintain. Illustrated with example GIFs.
Figma basics, part 2. A walkthrough of strokes, grouping, components, and auto layout — the features that make UI parts genuinely reusable. With GIFs for each step. A foundation for a small design system.
Figma basics, part 1. The first set of operations to learn in Figma: creating a frame, changing its background fill, moving and resizing elements, entering text, and aligning. Walked through with example GIFs, written for first-time Figma users.
A setup guide for getting started with Figma. Covers what Figma is, its core characteristics, account signup, team creation, opening a new design file, and the basics of the editor — step by step, with screenshots. A starting point for anyone new to UI design.