dale lane

If you’re a Node.js person, try running: npx dalelane

I recently read Ashley Willis’ blog post about her “terminal business card” – a lovely project she shared that prints out a virtual CLI business card if you run npx ashleywillis.

Check out her blog post for the history of where this all started, and an explanation of how it works.

I love this!

npx dalelane

Blast from the past

It reminds me (and I’m showing my age here) of the finger UNIX command we had in my University days.

Other than IRC, finger was our social media: we maintained .plan and .project files in our profile directory, and anyone else at Uni could run finger <username> to see info about you and what you’re up to.

We created all sorts of endlessly creative ASCII-art plan files, and came up with all sorts of unnecessarily elaborate ways to automate updates to those files.

I haven’t thought about that for years, but Ashley’s project reminded me of it so strongly that I had to give it a try.

npx dalelane

A dynamic business card needs live data

Her blog post explains how to get it working. I mostly just shamelessly copied it. But where her project is elegant and concise, I naturally crammed in noise. 🙂

I wanted live data, so I updated my “business card” to include what I’m currently reading (from my Goodreads profile), the most recent video game I’ve played (from my Backloggd profile), the most recent song I’ve listened to (from my Last.fm profile) and my most recent post from Bluesky.

(It is a little bit hacky and scrape-y, but realistically it’ll be run so infrequently I don’t feel like it’ll cause any harm!)

Try it for yourself!

You can see my fork of the project at
github.com/dalelane/dalelane.dev-card.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025 at 3:57 pm and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.