Posts on Nick Liu - Software Engineer

Blowfish supports four analytics providers. Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't one.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For six months I assumed nobody could tell whether anyone read this blog, because I had never added analytics. Wiring up Cloudflare Web Analytics by hand taught me two things: the obvious place to paste the snippet would have shipped my Playwright suite's page views into the dashboard, and the dashboard had been quietly counting my visitors for two months anyway.

🧪 Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104

Publishing into the void
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The site’s hugo.toml had a googleAnalytics line commented out since roughly the first commit. I never uncommented it. GA4 wants a cookie disclosure, ships a chunky client, and ad blockers eat it anyway, which felt like a lot of ceremony for a personal blog whose one open question was “does anybody visit.”

My og:image URLs were broken for months. baseURL was the culprit.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paste one of my post links into a social preview and the card comes up with no image. The site itself renders fine, every page, every browser. The culprit was one character in `hugo.toml`: `baseURL = "/"`, which quietly turns every absolute URL the site emits into a relative one that only a browser can love.

🧪 Tested with Hugo 0.163.3 · Blowfish 2.104

The symptom
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Share cards without images, that was the visible part. View source on any page and the metadata told the fuller story:

A typo fix shouldn't boot a browser in CI. Mine did for months.

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I changed one sentence in a blog post, opened a pull request, and watched CI spend about 85 seconds installing a headless Chromium to confirm my prose still turned into HTML. The obvious fix, telling the workflow to ignore content paths, would have quietly broken every merge instead.

Symptom: a browser for a one-line edit
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Every pull request on this blog runs two jobs: a lint job, and a build-and-test job. The second one builds the site with Hugo, link-checks the output with htmltest, then installs a headless Chromium and runs a Playwright suite against a live hugo server. End to end, roughly 85 seconds, and almost all of it is Playwright.

Make tmux Show What Each Window Is Doing

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you use tmux, you've hit this: ten windows open and they're all named `zsh` or `node`. Which one had your AI agent running? No idea. Let's make tmux label windows usefully.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux

New to tmux? It’s a “terminal multiplexer”: it splits one terminal into many windows and panes that survive disconnects. The only vocabulary you need here: a window is like a browser tab inside tmux; the bar at the bottom lists them. The prefix is the key you press before a tmux command, commonly Ctrl+b (mine is Ctrl+a).

Why everything is named `zsh`
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By default tmux has a setting called automatic-rename turned on. It renames each window after whatever program is running in it. A shell? zsh. A Node program (like Claude Code)? node. Helpful in theory, useless when everything collapses to the same word.

Running Several AI Coding Agents Without Losing Track

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once you're comfortable with AI coding agents, you start running several at once: one refactoring here, one writing tests there, one stuck waiting for your approval. Keeping them straight is its own little skill.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux

Here are two ways to do it: a lightweight tmux plugin, and (briefly) dedicated “AI terminal” apps.

Stop Losing Your Claude Code Conversations

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You're deep in a great Claude Code conversation. You close the terminal. The next day you want to pick up where you left off… and you can't find it. Sound familiar? Let's fix that.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux

What is a “session,” and where does it go?
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Every time you run claude, you start a session, one conversation, with its full history. When you quit, that history doesn’t vanish. Claude Code saves it to disk, organized per project folder, here:

Your First Claude Code Hook: Auto-Name Every Session

nickboy@users.noreply.github.com (Nick Liu) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Part 1 we learned that named sessions are easy to find. Now let's make naming automatic with a hook. This is also a perfect first hook project, so I'll explain the whole idea from scratch.

🧪 Tested with Claude Code 2.1.x · macOS / Linux

Part 1 left us with one chore: you still have to remember to name your sessions. Let’s delete that chore.

Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot vs Windsurf: An Honest 2026 Comparison