The Ignyte blog
Writing from the studio.
Essays and notes on building tools for creators, independence from platforms, and making software that lasts.
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I removed a glow but kept the purple
A federal judge had to rule that em dashes weren't enough to prove a student used AI. The same flattening is hitting design now. Why I cut a glow on Beacon and kept the purple, and how I tell which design choices to defend.
- Building Beacon
The 30-second undo
Beacon's import button overwrites your state file. One click, gone. So I put three things on top of it: a preview dialog, an auto-backup, and a 30-second undo toast.
- Field Notes
We're not the only ones saying this
Tyler Denk runs Beehiiv. He's making the same ownership argument I keep making about link-in-bio, just from inside a $100M competitor to Substack. That's not coincidence; it's a category emerging.
- Building Beacon
Versioning the schema I didn't have yet
I added a __schemaVersion field to Beacon's config file before there was a v2. Three weeks later, I needed it. The case for stamping a version on every stateful file you ship.
- Teardown
$219 a month, $86 in your head
The average American household pays $219 a month for subscriptions and estimates they pay $86. The gap between those two numbers is the entire subscription economy.
- Building Beacon
Why Beacon has more colors now
I replaced Beacon's six-color palette with seven named slots. Counterintuitive simplification — more slots reduced friction, because each color finally meant something.
- Teardown
Tap Bio is closing. You can't take your page with you.
Tap Bio is shutting down on October 31. There is no export tool. This is what "platform tenant" actually means in practice.
- Building Beacon
The time I shipped my API key in page source
Before Beacon shipped, I caught a security mistake on my own link-in-bio. A Hardcover bearer token grants account deletion. Mine was visible in view-source for a while.
- Field Notes
Why I left Resend for Plunk
I migrated my email infrastructure off Resend, landed on Plunk, and built an open-source MCP server to close the last gap. Notes on the pricing curve, the open-source piece, and why this is the same story as everything else on this site.
- Building Beacon
The dependency I shipped on purpose
Beacon's Twitch tile depends on a free, unofficial scraper called decapi.me. Here's why I shipped it knowing the dependency could disappear tomorrow.