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An Open-Source SEO + GEO Audit Toolkit in Plain Node
Four Node SEO/GEO audit tools, zero runtime deps (one optional: Playwright): crawler, AI-crawler checks, Core Web Vitals, Search Console wins.
Latest Posts - 94
Updating Home Assistant in Docker Safely: My Workflow With Backup, Test and Rollback
How I update a Docker-based Home Assistant to a new version without breaking my smart home: full backup, update custom components first against the old core, recreate the container instead of in-place, note the image ID for a real rollback, and a post-update checklist.
A Home Assistant Energy Dashboard, Built Piece by Piece
How I turned raw inverter registers into a real Home Assistant energy dashboard: reading, monitoring and acting on solar surplus, battery and switching.
Shelly in Home Assistant: Local Switching & Energy Metering
How I run Shelly Plus 1PM/2PM behind my wall switches in Home Assistant — fully local switching plus per-channel energy metering, no cloud, physical switch kept.
A "Last Motion" Sensor in Home Assistant: Per-Room Timestamps with input_datetime
A reusable Home Assistant pattern: one input_datetime helper per motion sensor that records the exact time of the last movement — the data foundation for presence heuristics and a tidy "last seen" dashboard, no expensive mmWave sensors needed.
Motion Light With Time-of-Day Brightness in Home Assistant: the choose Pattern (30% Night, 70% Morning, 100% Day)
A complete Home Assistant motion-light recipe with a choose: block that dims by time of day, a sensible off-delay, and the one tweak that actually stops the light flickering on and off.
KNX Thermostats Drop to 'Standby' After Every Home Assistant Restart — A Startup Automation Fix
After every Home Assistant restart my KNX thermostats fell to 'standby' and stopped heating. Here is the homeassistant-start automation — with the crucial 30-second delay and a choose block — that re-initialises every thermostat to the correct mode.
Window Open, Heating Off: Auto-Switch Each KNX Thermostat to Frost Protection in Home Assistant
A reproducible Home Assistant automation: a KNX window contact switches that room's thermostat to building_protection (frost guard) when it opens and back to comfort when it closes — with a 5-second debounce that stops the false triggers most tutorials ignore.
A Robust Modbus Proxy: Reconnect, Stale-Cache Detection and Timeouts Done Right
A failure-mode playbook for a self-built Modbus cache proxy in Home Assistant: reconnect with backoff, stale-cache detection that HA can alert on, per-batch and client timeouts, and 50 ms spacing for a slow SDongle — so the proxy never silently serves zeros after a nightly drop or firmware reboot.
Modbus Write-Through: Control Battery & Inverter Through a Caching Proxy in Home Assistant
A caching Modbus proxy only solves reads. Here is the write-through path: pass FC6 register writes straight to the inverter on a short-lived connection, echo the response, return proper Modbus exceptions — so you can force-charge the battery or set power limits over a single shared connection.
What AI Crawlers Actually Do to a Small Blog: 9 Days of Logs
Nine days of nginx logs from a small blog: 18,209 AI-crawler hits. Which bots (ChatGPT-User, Bytespider, ClaudeBot), who honours robots.txt, and the JS-less view they actually see.