Issues with sending account related emails as well as the contact form are hopefully fixed now.

I have now finally implemented the free GMail SMTP to replace the unreliable shared hosting's builtin mail. The limit of 500 emails per day with Google is plenty enough for Koohii - whereas a limit of 100 emails per day as part of the free tier on some services like SendGrid was just a tad under what we need. On a really good day I've seen peaks of 80 registrations. Throughout the year when traffic increases it's not rare to see 40-60 registrations per 24h period, with an average around 30. Add to that password update and forgot password emails and we would definitely hit a 100 emails/day limit sometimes during the year.

The main downside I found out using the free GMail SMTP - is all the emails must be sent "From" the Kanji Koohii email. For the contact form it prevents me from setting the user's email as the sender. It means 2-3 extra clicks/copy-paste when I reply to a Contact form message but it's a small price to pay for the free service.

Hopefully this provides a better experience for new users as well as returning users - turns out Forgot Password is a feature that's pretty frequently used!

Old laptops, new tricks

Since I recently moved to a new co-loc arrangement and I don't have my desk yet I did this update on a late 2009 Macbook Pro! I needed something to keep me busy and to be able handle Koohii emails etc. I normally never work on a laptop but I had this one lying around so I figured, why not, let's see what we can do with it. I had a 240 GB SSD lying around, so I grabbed 8 GB RAM fairly cheap on Amazon and loaded it up with Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 10!

You can run some decent looking games like Tomb Raider Anniversary or Guild Wars, and of course emulators like DuckStation but I thought modern web tools like docker, npm Vite etc would be an issue... turns out I had low expectations! Running php/apache/mariadb in docker is pretty lightweight and building the frontend with Vite doesn't take long. It does take a good second when switching between pages in development mode however. Obviously the CPU usage goes up and down wildly when I fire up VSCode, or open Google Chrome or when I play YouTube videos. But otherwise the CPU tends to sit around 20%. No doubt it could be even lower with a lightweight Linux distro but I like the bells and whistles of Ubuntu + GNOME.

Turns out the biggest downside to using this late 2009 Macbook Pro laptop is the screen! The colours on this LCD panel are washed out and it's really not usable for serious front end since you can't do any sort of subtle shading when designing a web page. This old laptop would be insane with a good screen.