Two dead buttons. Nothing crashed, so nothing told me.

Shipped

I shipped eight new guides on electricaltoolbox.com this week, built around Halloween lighting and decorations: cord length limits, breaker trip risk, fog machine circuit load, timer and overnight safety. Halloween is ten weeks out. That is on purpose. Search engines need lead time to find a new page and start ranking it, so the pages that show up in an October search get written in August. Each guide links straight into the working calculator, not a footer mention.

Broke

My cookie consent banner, the popup asking if you are OK with tracking cookies, had two dead buttons for some visitors, and I did not know until this week. Browsers keep a small file called localStorage to remember choices like that. It is supposed to just come back empty the first time, quietly. But when a browser blocks that storage entirely (private browsing, some corporate laptops, an ad blocker on its strictest setting), the read does not come back empty. It throws an error and stops the page’s script cold. My banner tried to read that file before it hooked up the Accept and Decline buttons, so the error killed the buttons before they ever worked. No crash the visitor could see. Just two buttons that quietly never did anything.

The fix was small: wrap the read and the write in a try/catch so a blocked store cannot kill the script. Finding it was the actual work. It shipped fine for months because nothing crashed loudly. It just took the buttons away from anyone whose browser blocks storage, and my own testing browser never does.

Steal this

If your site remembers anything in the browser (a cookie choice, a dark mode setting, a login), wrap every one of those reads so an error cannot stop the page. A private browsing tab, a locked-down work laptop, an ad blocker on its strictest setting: any of them can block that memory entirely, and turn a normal check into a hard stop instead of a quiet “nothing saved yet.” One unguarded check early in a script can silently break everything wired up after it, buttons included.

Worth knowing

Google shipped a new AI model this week: Gemini 3.7 Flash, out August 13. “Flash” is Google’s name for the fast, cheap tier of a model family, built for high volume rather than the hardest problems. It is priced at 0.75 dollars per million tokens in and 3.75 dollars per million out, about half of what the last Flash model cost. A token is roughly three quarters of a word, so a million tokens is a long conversation, not one message. Google built this version specifically for coding and multi-step agent work: code meant to run and deploy on the first try more often, not a draft you still have to go fix. That price holds through the end of 2026, then doubles on January 1, 2027.

Why it matters if you use any AI coding tool: which model does the work behind the scenes keeps changing, and the cheap tier just got meaningfully more capable for the price. If you route routine tasks to a cheap model to save cost, this one is worth a look before the intro price expires.