Brian Cantoni

• Copilot is my Copilot July 24, 2025

  Migrating this blog to Eleventy has been a good project for learning GitHub Copilot with some real-world scenarios and problem solving. We're currently using Cursor and other in-house AI tools at work, so playing with Copilot here has been a nice comparison. Here's a sample of several ways I used Copilot and how well it worked. ...

• Migrating WordPress To Eleventy July 12, 2025

  After 11 years on WordPress, I moved this blog to Eleventy (11ty) and I'm very happy with the results. These are my notes on the background and process for anyone going through a similar move. ...

• Proper Sitemap Update Dates for Eleventy July 10, 2025

  Sitemaps are the recommended way to ensure search engines understand all the pages on your site. This site is pretty simple and I'm not sure whether a sitemap is strictly needed, but I had one with WordPress and I'd like to keep it going. One important piece for this 23 year old blog is signalling when old posts are updated, so I had to make sure my new Eleventy-powered site handled that piece correctly. ...

• Migrated to Static Site (Eleventy) May 28, 2025

  After a nice 11 year run on WordPress I have spent the last few weeks migrating this site to the Eleventy (11ty) static site generator and switched over on the 24th. WordPress was fun to learn and had some nice features, but in the end was overkill for what I needed and I tired of keeping up with version upgrades and recovering from spammers hacking my site. ...

• Tableau Workbook Thumbnail Viewer by Claude March 11, 2025

  Claude wrote for me a simple tool for viewing and optionally removing thumbnails from a Tableau workbook file. I’m calling it my Aha! moment for AI-assisted development :) ...

• From Laptop to Cloud: Scaling YouTube Video Transcription with LLMs February 4, 2025

  My experiments around Summarizing YouTube Videos with LLMs have been working well on my Mac laptop, but I’d really like to run it as a service on a regular schedule. Running the OpenAI Whisper transcription process locally requires more than 1GB that my favorite Digital Ocean droplets provide. Instead I’ve added an option to run it directly against the OpenAI Transcriptions AI (the official OpenAI Python library makes it very easy). ...

• Summarizing YouTube Videos with LLMs January 22, 2025

  Over the holiday break I was thinking about taking transcriptions of YouTube videos and running them through an LLM for summaries. My inspiration was the dust up around Honey coupon code browser extension. Most of the news pointed to MegaLag’s video Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam. It’s a 23 minute video which isn’t too bad, but I wondered whether a summary would help here? ...

• Forced to Retire Weather by Text Service November 20, 2020

  I finally had to turn off the public number for my free Weather by Text service which I’ve been running for a few years. I was fine with the minimal cost running this on Twilio, but over the last couple of months someone has been abusing the number presumably with some automated script. The challenge with Twilio SMS is there is no way to block any abusive incoming text messages. Even though the pricing is pretty cheap ($ 0.0075 per message), it adds up quickly because you’re charged for both the incoming and outgoing messages. In the end, it’s not worth running a free service where one user can drive hundreds of abusive messages each day with no recourse. ...

• Top 40 Podcasts May 26, 2020

  Here in California we’ve entered our third month of sheltering in place and working from home. One positive is less time spent commuting, but that also means it’s been harder to keep up with my podcast subscriptions. Combine that with the fact that there are so many good podcasts out there and I’ve had to shorten my subscription list a little bit (and be pickier about which episodes to listen to). ...

• WordPress Release Candidate Builds in Docker March 6, 2020

  The first WordPress 5.4 release candidate was just published this week. The official WordPress Docker images are only published for release builds, so you can’t test any RC builds from there (for example on the Tags tab you won’t find 5.4-RC1 anywhere). However, it’s pretty straightforward to build the RC build yourself locally following these steps. ...

More posts can be found in the full archive - or by exploring the tags.