Entry 006 - "Greetings from Germany"

June 6th 2026

That phrase always gives me a chuckle because every year there are two video
game speedrunning events for charity and as they read off donations, it seems
like every other one starts with that phrase.

What made me think of it today was seeing that I had some visitors to my little
phlog from there. Thanks to some inspiration by scnemo's code snippet showing
how to save a timestamp when a gophermap is hit, I added a little bit extra to
both my main gophermap and phlog.

gophermap
=========
=echo "$(TZ=America/New_York date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') | $REMOTE_ADDR | gophermap" >> $LOG_PATH
=========


phlog.cgi (shell script)
========================
echo "$(TZ=America/New_York date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') | $REMOTE_ADDR | $SELECTOR" >> $LOG_PATH
========================


I'm on the east coast so I have it set to format the date so I don't have to do
mental math every time I look at the log. Now that I have data coming in, I can
see IP addresses and if they're hitting my gopherhole or phlog, but I want to
know where they're coming from.

I'm forced to use Claude Code at work even though I have always been a
do-it-yourself-by-hand kind of guy, but have found that it does a good job of
making dashboards that look better than anything I could do. It's also way
faster since it may take me a few days or a week to really get it in a good
working state.

I'm not an AI cheerleader or anything, I just think that for code it's not that
different than going onto stackoverflow and finding a code snippet and using it
like we've all done since forever. For other uses, let's just say I'll have a
well crafted opinion on that soon enough.

So anyway, I threw this log at it along with some details on what tech to use,
how to format things, file structures, and it spit out a pretty decent python
script. I never blindly trust anything AI creates so I stepped through it line
by line in the debugger and made sure it was doing what I told it to and that
there were no surprises. The code was pretty solid and only needed a couple of
small tweaks before I was satisfied.

Here's the file if anyone is interested:
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/nervtoji/code/visits_report.py

The output was a nice looking html file with all the embedded css, js, json,
everything needed to make a snazzy little dashboard with a map.

And of course, one of the first things I noticed was a spot on the map over what
looks like good ole Deutschland!

Greetings. I see you. Thanks for coming.