Hi, I’m Ben.
Creative developer.
Long-time web tinkerer.
For almost 20 years, I’ve been building for the web, working on massive game titles such as No Man’s Sky and Fable Legends (RIP). Welcome to my personal space and microblog: a stream of what I’m learning, playing, thinking, and doing.
More about meRecent writing
Basic Gmail SMTP setup for Ghost
Item flow: a potential concept for masonry layouts
Recent notes
2026-04-13 15:10
Chatting with Claude is such a breath of fresh air compared to Gemini.
I was having some issues with my Ghost template files and I was using Claude to help me debug it. I attached my routes.yaml file and asked Claude if it could be causing the problem. A second later, Claude responded:
The routes file looks fine, that's not the issue.
The blunt response took me by surprise and made me laugh. It was straight to the point and just like talking to a dev - I loved it!
My biggest issue with Gemini is how much it pads out its answers with stuff that isn't useful. I can instruct Gemini to write brief responses for the current chat, but it looks like I setting that permanently for all future chats currently isn't available to UK, EEA, or Switzerland.
2026-04-13 09:42
TFW you slip into some bad habits during a week off. Maybe your sleep pattern goes out the window, or you eat too much Easter chocolate and the scales are now going in the wrong direction.
So, you tell yourself that when you go back to work you're going to hit things hard again. Back to the gym, playing football, getting in 10,000 steps every day, and eating cleaner.
Then, on the first day back at work, you get hit with a bout of food poisoning. Guess I'll start tomorrow, then... 🤮
2026-04-11 22:50
Bit of site housekeeping this evening, improving styling for some of the older components on the site. Always satisfying to use modern CSS to achieve the same outcome as before but with fewer lines.