Hello.

I am Paul Kinlan.

A Developer Advocate for Chrome and the Open Web at Google.

I love the web. The web should allow anyone to access any experience that they need without the need for native install or content walled garden.

User Agents Hitting My Site

Paul Kinlan

Curious about who's visiting my site, I built a user-agent tracker using Vercel middleware and KV storage. It logs every request and displays a live table of user agents and hit counts, refreshing every minute. Check out the code on GitHub!

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Paul Kinlan

I added ActivityPub support to my static Hugo blog hosted on Vercel. It now automatically announces new posts to followers on the Fediverse. Key challenges included implementing the ActivityPub protocol for a static site, handling WebFinger discovery, managing Follow/Unfollow requests, and sending signed HTTP requests. I used Vercel Serverless Functions for dynamic request handling and Firebase Firestore for storing follower data. Check out the code and follow me @paul@paul.kinlan.me to see it in action!

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Post Deploy Webhook for Vercel

Paul Kinlan

I needed to find a way to send webhooks after a successful deployment on Vercel, which wasn't a built-in feature. Since Vercel integrations can listen for deployment events, I created one to solve this. It's a simple tool hosted on GitHub that lets you set up custom webhooks for your Vercel projects. It's not on the Vercel Marketplace, and it's more of a workaround until Vercel natively supports deployment webhooks. Check out the GitHub repo for instructions on setting it up with Firebase Firestore.

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Simulating Apache mod_include for Vercel

Paul Kinlan

For my Hugo static site hosted on Vercel, I wanted a simple way to include server-side logic, like a copyright notice, without setting up a full backend. I created a function that mimics Apache's mod_include to inject dynamic content. It rewrites HTML requests through a handler that parses files for <!--#include ... --> directives. The file command injects file content, while the virtual command fetches content from the /api directory (like a modern /cgi-bin/). Caching is crucial for performance. Check out the demo and code. A more robust solution like Cloudflare Workers' HTMLRewriter would be ideal, but this works for simple use cases.

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