widgets-steam-and-a-fake.md

Widgets, Steam, and a Fake System That Thinks My Vibe is 100%

// August 18, 2026 • 3 min read

# web dev

Welcome back, nobody!

Tonight started with a pretty simple realisation — I'd built a whole admin dashboard and somehow forgotten to include anywhere to update my Currently Reading. The book data was already in the database, the about page was already pulling from it, I just had no way to actually change it without going into phpMyAdmin like some kind of animal.

One new file later (update-current-book.php) and that was sorted. It fetches the existing row, pre-fills the form so you can see what you're updating, and overwrites it on submit. Simple, tidy, done. I even put it under Manage Books in the dashboard because I have organisational standards apparently.

Then I got a bit carried away.

I added a Steam widget to the homepage. I don't play PC games that much — I'm more of a Switch 2 and Xbox guy — but I've put enough time into Space Haven, Empyrion, and DayZ to make the leaderboard look respectable. The widget pulls from the Steam API and shows my profile picture, username, top three most played games with hours, and a link to my Steam profile. It took surprisingly little code and looks genuinely cool, which is always a dangerous combination because it makes me want to keep going.

So I kept going.

The second widget is a fake system stats readout — USER, UPTIME, CPU, RAM, VIBE, CAFFEINE — displayed in classic terminal bar format. Most of it is completely made up (my vibe is locked at 100%, non-negotiable), but the UPTIME is real. It counts up from the 23rd of July 2026, which is when I first started building this site, and ticks up every single second in real time.

26 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes and counting.

I then spent ten minutes fighting Unicode block characters rendering as question marks before remembering that this has happened to me before and I should really just use numeric HTML entities.

New Widgets!

To round it off, I disabled dragging on mobile because having five floating windows that you can accidentally drag while trying to scroll is, it turns out, not a great user experience. Who knew.

Key Features:

  • Added a Currently Reading updater to the admin dashboard 📖
  • Built a Steam widget with profile pic, username and top 3 most played games 🎮
  • Built a fake system stats widget with a live uptime counter ⏱️
  • Fixed Unicode block character rendering (again) 😅
  • Disabled widget dragging on mobile for sanity 📱