karitham.dev

Personal site. Gleam SSG that fetches from the AT Protocol (Bluesky PDS + Tangled) at build time, then three small Lustre islands (profile, music, repos) mounted on the server-rendered markup re-fetch fresh data and re-render client-side. Album covers, artist photos, and the profile avatar/banner are mirrored into the site at build time, so the visitor's browser never has to fetch from Cover Art Archive, Wikimedia, or the PDS directly — every image is served from /img/... on the site itself.

Build

nix develop          # or: direnv reload
just refresh         # data pipeline: plays + covers + mirrored images
just build           # codegen → client JS → static site → ./dist/
just test            # run all tests
just clean           # wipe build artifacts
just new my-slug     # scaffold a new post

Needs Gleam 1.17+ and Erlang/OTP 28+ — nix develop provides everything.

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
BLOG_URL	https://karitham.dev	Base URL for OG tags, RSS, and links

BLOG_URL="http://localhost:8000" just build

Refreshing listening data

The Music section's stats, covers, and page links come from a data pipeline that runs before just build:

just refresh

refresh downloads your play history as a CAR file from the PDS, aggregates top-N artists/albums/tracks per time range, resolves album covers (Cover Art Archive), artist photos (MusicBrainz → Wikidata → Wikimedia Commons), and MusicBrainz page links, then writes priv/cache/plays-stats.json and mirrors every image into priv/cache/img/ for the SSG to copy into dist/img/.

Every lookup is cache-first with per-endpoint rate limiting, jittered retries, and Retry-After handling; with a warm cache refresh is fully offline and only new plays touch the network. A failed or interrupted run never corrupts the caches (atomic writes), and the next run simply re-does what didn't finish.

CI runs just refresh && just build on every push and caches priv/cache/cover-cache.json + priv/cache/img between runs, so deploys only resolve and download what's new. The whole priv/cache dir is gitignored and wiped by just clean.

Adding a post

just new my-post-slug

Scaffolds priv/posts/my-post-slug/index.md with today's date and draft: true. Flip draft: false to publish.

Or create a directory manually:

priv/posts/my-post/
  index.md
  hero.png          # optional hero/banner image
  diagram.png       # → /posts/my-post/diagram.png

Frontmatter:

---
title: My Post
description: short summary
date: 2026-07-18
tags: [gleam, atproto]
draft: true
image: hero.png
---

Slug is the directory name. Build validates required fields and fails with a clear error if something's wrong.

Layout

Four components:

Component	Role
shared/	Model types, generated decoders, view components, DOM id constants (compiled to both Erlang and JS)
root	SSG — fetches data, mirrors images, renders, writes dist/
client/	Three Lustre islands on the server-rendered markup — re-fetch on load and tab visibility, plays poll every 30s. just client builds one self-executing minified module via lustre/dev build
tools/parse-plays	Rust CLI — CAR → play stats, cover/artist resolution, image mirroring

Tests

just test
# or, per suite:
gleam test && (cd shared && gleam test) && (cd client && gleam test)