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Notes from building and shipping real projects — the bugs, the trade-offs, and what I would do differently.

Featured Article My Site Shipped Zeros to Google: An Animated Counter SSG Bug

Web Development

August 19, 2026

6 min read

My Site Shipped Zeros to Google: An Animated Counter SSG Bug

My homepage showed "2+ Projects Shipped" in the browser and "0+ Projects Shipped" to every crawler that fetched it. Here is how a standard animated counter pattern silently poisoned my static HTML, and the two-line fix.

Muhammad Taki AhmedFounder & Software Developer at Raydrim

How I Automated CJ Dropshipping Order Fulfillment with a Python Script

How we eliminated the daily grind of manual order entry between our self-hosted hardware store and CJ Dropshipping using an autonomous Python fulfillment daemon with SQLite SKU mapping and automatic tracking synchronization.

Mobile-First Responsive Patterns That Actually Work for Product Pages

Most mobile e-commerce product pages are desktop layouts squeezed until they fit. Here are the battle-tested CSS patterns we use at Raydrim: zero-JS swipe galleries, rock-solid sticky buy bars, fluid clamp typography, and the desktop resize cache bug that ruins drawer navigation.

Building a White-Label Checkout Without Shopify or WooCommerce

Why pay monthly SaaS platform subscriptions and a 2% penalty fee just to host a payment form? Here is how we engineered a custom, sub-30ms white-label checkout engine using FastAPI, SQLite, and Stripe Elements — complete with dynamic order schemas, simulated sandbox payments, and automated PDF invoicing.

Image Compression for Core Web Vitals: A Practical Checklist

Images account for over 70% of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) failures in modern web applications. Here is our battle-tested checklist for Next.js and modern web stacks: format triage between AVIF and WebP, the mechanics of Next.js image optimization, avoiding the lazy-loading LCP trap, responsive sizes calibration, and real benchmarks from a 77% speedup.

Sub-70ms Full-Text Catalog Search with SQLite FTS5 in Next.js 16

How we avoided the operational tax and monthly infrastructure costs of cloud search clusters in a 1,024-product storefront by deploying SQLite FTS5 with BM25 ranking, achieving sub-70ms query latency.

My Site Shipped Zeros to Google: An Animated Counter SSG Bug

A Non-US Founder's Guide to Accepting International Payments Online

Building software from Dhaka, Lagos, or Karachi is easy; collecting payments from US and European clients without getting accounts frozen is a regulatory minefield. Here is how non-US founders legitimately set up US LLCs, UK LTDs, or Merchants of Record, navigate EINs without an SSN, and avoid the $25,000 IRS compliance trap.

I Built 22 Browser Games With No Framework and No Build Step

Campus Dude is 22 games that run instantly with no login and no install. Choosing vanilla JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas over a framework was the decision that made every other constraint achievable.

Setting Up Transactional Email with Node.js, SMTP, and PDF Attachments

A practical production tutorial on sending order confirmation emails with dynamic PDF receipt attachments using Node.js and Nodemailer. We cover SMTP transport selection, Outlook-proof HTML email templates, in-memory PDF generation with PDFKit, and exponential backoff retry logic for transient 4xx errors.

AWS Amplify vs Vercel vs Render: Where to Deploy Your Next.js App in 2026

We deployed production Next.js applications across Vercel, AWS Amplify Gen 2, and Render. Here is the unvarnished reality of build times, cold starts, edge revalidations, and the invoice surprises nobody warns you about.

Muhammad Taki Ahmed

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