api

Fixing an N+1 API fan-out in commitcheck: one pagination pass replaces 250 requests, SSL timeout gone, runtime down to 27.5s.

TL;DR: The monitor hung for over 100 seconds because each candidate triggered full pagination, creating roughly 250 requests per run. Replacing per-candidate checks with a single paginated fetch into a commit-to-slug map removed the N+1 overhead. Runtime dropped to 27.5 seconds with only a few requests and no change to the API contract.

Pure-Python cosine, vectors in MariaDB postmeta, embeddings computed locally. Semantic features with no new service on a small server.

TL;DR: Running a blog on a 1GB VPS rules out a vector database, so the author computes bge-m3 embeddings locally via Ollama and stores them as JSON in MariaDB postmeta. Related-article matching and dup-checks use pure-Python cosine similarity, fast enough for around 100 articles. Lesson: for small blogs, skip Qdrant or pgvector until scale demands it.

Two-layer API key rotation, provider fallback, and DoH for lying ISP DNS: lessons from building a research script that refuses to die quietly.

TL;DR: Firecrawl's keyless search endpoint died with permanent 403s mid-research, so the author pivoted to keyed APIs. The result is web-direct.py, 125 lines doing search, scrape, and extract with two-layer rotation: next key first, then next provider. A DoH health check catches lying ISP DNS, falling back to curl --resolve.

A security audit uncovered 11 findings in the chat AI pipeline, from cache keys to prompt injection.

Chat follow-up questions without server sessions: history lives in localStorage, gets resent per ask, and the backend rebuilds the prompt under a char budget.

The blog's AI chat now answers 'what are you working on' from local commit history: a narrow port, a version namespace bump, and term mining.

When the LLM router died, a meta fallback event arrived and the visitor still got an answer. Here's the three-part chain behind it.

Typing hai used to kill the AI search with no_results. The culprit was MariaDB's fulltext word-length floor, not a broken prompt.

EventSource can't POST. The blog's Ask AI answers run through a plain fetch, a hand-rolled SSE parser, and one CRLF trap worth remembering.