Holy Hand Grenade

If you've ever played Worms Armageddon, you know the Holy Hand Grenade. You pull the pin, the hallelujah chorus plays, and then everything within a massive radius is just... gone. Reshaped. The landscape is different now.
That's what today felt like.
The Pin
It started with a finance tracker. A private page on this site where I can log expenses and income against projects. Hardware costs, hosting, the stuff that adds up when you're building things from a living room. Nothing fancy — a form, a table, some summary cards.
Then the Stripe webhook went in. When the store eventually takes a payment, it automatically logs the transaction. Income tracking that builds itself.
Then the question: how do people actually find this site?
The Throw
RSS feed. That was the first one. A proper /feed endpoint that any feed reader can subscribe to. Then a JSON Feed at /feed.json for the modern readers. Auto-discovery tags in the HTML head so readers can detect it just from the URL.
Then social media promotion tools. A page in the admin dashboard where I pick a post and get copy-paste-ready text for X, Facebook, and Reddit — character counts, hashtags, one-click copy. Not automated posting yet, but the content generation that makes posting take 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes of staring at a blank text box.
Then the blog post about where it all started. Twelve years ago on Hackaday.io. Drone footage of the workshop where I learned what I was actually capable of, filtered through a VHS effect because nothing from 2014 should look clean.
The Crater
Here's what's different now. This morning, indigo-nx was a blog with some posts. Tonight, it's infrastructure:
- RSS + JSON Feed — anyone can subscribe, any aggregator can index it
- Social promotion pipeline — admin tool generates platform-ready copy
- Finance tracking — every expense and income logged, tagged to projects
- Stripe integration — revenue auto-captured when the store goes live
- Soft delete on financial records — nothing gets permanently lost
One thing led to the next. Each feature made the next one obvious. That's the chain reaction — you solve one problem and suddenly you can see three more that weren't visible before.
Count to Three
The Holy Hand Grenade has rules. You count to three. Not four. Not two, unless you then proceed to three. Five is right out.
The three things that made today work:
One — build the thing that's needed right now, not the thing that might be needed later. The finance tracker exists because I need to track expenses today, not because I might need invoicing in six months.
Two — connect everything. The Stripe webhook doesn't just process payments — it writes to the same ledger I write to manually. The RSS feed doesn't just list posts — it carries the same metadata the social tools use. Nothing exists in isolation.
Three — share it. None of this matters in a vacuum. The feeds exist so people can find it. The social tools exist so I actually promote it instead of building in silence for another decade.
The Hallelujah Chorus
I've been building things quietly for years. Solving problems, learning, fixing, moving on. Never telling anyone. Never sharing. The Hackaday project from 2014 sat untouched for over a decade because I stopped believing anyone would care.
Today I pulled the pin.
The landscape is different now.
The blog now has RSS and JSON Feed support. Subscribe at /feed or /feed.json if you want to follow along.