Weeknote #15 [W26.02] - Malcolm, the cat, returns; and setting up likes, comments & notifications

Malcolm, the cat, returns

Malcolm had left around a month ago, right before I went to Trivandrum for the film festival.

His original family still hasn’t moved into their new place, so he was kept at someone else’s house in the meantime. It doesn’t seem like he had a great time there. So now he’s back with me.

While he was away, he got neutered. And got a thermal burn from a heating pad during the procedure (which, apparently, Google search tells me, is not a very uncommon thing). The entire right side of his body is badly burnt. The poor thing has also lost a lot of weight.

On a more positive note, after an initial few hours of frostiness, he’s seems to be way more affectionate and cuddly than he used to be earlier.

I don’t know how much of that can be extrapolated beyond a cat, to how we as humans feel (or how much of it is just me projecting)… But it makes me think about how distance and physical absence can sometimes heighten affection. Or at least make it suddenly more noticeable again. Routine renders things invisible.

You can now leave likes and comments

I’ve added the ability to leave likes and comments on the site. (That’s already a couple of things done from my list of things I wanted to add to my blog this year.)

I was afraid it would be complicated, because I haven’t really tried setting up dynamic backend databases before. Until now, the site setup was extremely simple: a couple of Astro layouts, simple CSS styling, Markdown formatted posts, and very little JS. Even the Cinema Next Door website only uses runs on a static database with no real-time interaction.

Supabase as the backend database

To my surprise, it didn’t turn out to be too difficult to set things up. I used Supabase as a backend database, with two tables — one for likes, one for comments — and relied heavily on some very unglamorous vibe coding (with Gemini) to connect everything to the front end.

The downside here is that all this significantly increases the complexity of running and maintaining the blog. Apart from the backend database, I also had to create two new dynamic React components for the like button and the comments section.

Setting up notifications with Discord

Once that was done, I wanted a way to actually know when someone interacted with a post. I needed a system to get updates/notifications.

Manually checking the Supabase database for updates felt too tedious. So I was, at first, thinking of setting up some sort of login and admin dashboard to be able to see all that. But that seemed like a whole project of its own. The simplest solution turned out to be setting up a new Discord server and connecting it with Supabase with a webhook.

Now, when someone leaves a like or a comment, I’ll get a notification on my phone (through the Discord app). I find the whole thing delightful.