Inspiration has hit me again, and so I’ve dove back into BASIC programming via LowRes NX to make a new game. This time, I’m making an ice skating game somewhat inspired by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Besides some half-hearted Google Analytics embeds on a couple of my sites set up years ago, I’ve never really kept track of who (or what) visits my websites.

THAT ENDS NOW!

Ahem.

I’ve been doing a lot of posting on my Mastodon instance lately. It’s been fun just throwing a few hundred characters up every now and then, and interacting with a new crowd of artists, programmers, and geeks I’ve amassed over the last ~10 months.

Media embeds work pretty seamlessly in a Mastodon post, but I’ve never tried to embed a Mastodon post somewhere else.

Let’s try it!

I’ve been blogging on the web for over 20 years. I started with LiveJournal, moved to a personal Wordpress, and then created a Jekyll blog inside my public site.

Moving all of that cruft from one system to another is non-trivial, and I left a lot of old stuff in a format that couldn’t be used…until now.

Note: the post header image was created using NightCafe, but the words are my own (I swear!).

First of all, RIP Heardle :(

Second of all, I have a big enough ego to attempt my own Heardle, but using only my music. And so, I did.

About 6 months ago I did a post about self-hosting: installing versions of server software on your own host, rather than using services provided wholly by another entity (Gmail, Github, etc.). I talked about which services I’m currently self-hosting and which I was thinking about self-hosting.

Let’s get up to speed on what my current status is.

Way back in 2017, I created a web app called Raffler that let you take a bunch of choices, put them in a digital hat, and pick one out at random. It was one of my first projects to really experiment with things like the Web Storage API, SASS, CreateJS, GulpJS, and actually having my code be used in a public forum.

Since then, both JS and CSS have improved significantly, and I’ve found myself wishing to use fewer dependencies, if possible. Thus, a renovation was in order.

Are you a musician or sound designer or any sort? Ever just need to listen to a bunch of sketches or samples you’ve made, one after the other, but don’t feel ready to put them into a “real” audio application like iTunes? Want to be able to listen to them from any device with an Internet connection and a web browser?

If any of that made sense to you, then SoundLister may be of interest.

It’s finally time to reveal my finished web game: Bogdle.

I blogged about it before and it’s finally ready for prime time.

While designing a webapp that needs to call a remote API, sometimes the API you actually need to use is too complicated or not even available due to local development access issues (e.g. CORS). It’s times like these you learn to, uh, use something lighter and more accessible.

Sure, there’s plenty of Public APIs you could use for such a purpose, but as a developer I like to take a crack at making my own version of something at least once.

Thus, I created Daaaaave, a simple public API built with PHP.

Welp, it’s been about 4 months since I last rapped at ya about a new web app (Bogdle) I was working on, inspired by the Wordle craze (that has since cooled). I’ve done a lot of work on it, and it’s more or less ready, save for some bugfixes and polish.

The only thing is…it kind of spurred on a bit of a Renaissance in personal web development, and my time has been divided among several projects, delaying the release of Bogdle. I’m calling them all NebApps, because they’re sharing a lot of the same structure and styling, hopefully creating a cohesive set of sites.

My flight of fancy with the domain and blog name “Codaname” is no more. What once was my code and audio blog with a haphazard idea to merge a musical term (“coda”) and some kind of spy reference (“codename”) is now gone…

…and is now just part of my main site, MichaelChadwick.Info!

You remember Boggle, right? Grid of letters, find words, etc. You also are probably aware of Wordle, as it’s arguably the most popular English-langage word guessing game existing right now.

As you can see by the header image, I’ve made some progress on such a thing! However, bugs still need to be squashed, a “new puzzle each day” mechanic needs to be sussed out, and rough edges need to be sanded down. However, how did I even get here?

I present a short introductory post for now…

Once upon a time I created a web app called Audio Hash. It involved low-level audio manipulation in order to take multiple audio files, grab random chunks of them, and then combine them into a sampler of sorts, or a “hash”.

The only problem is…it still doesn’t work (as of 2022-02-11).

It’s now 2022 (or 2020 2, if you’re cheeky), and time for a blog-type announcement dealio: NebyooBlog, formerly here, is finally shutting down…

…so it can be integrated here ;P

The awesome rock band that I play in just (well, recently) released a second album! It’s called Unwound, and it’s a definite sophomore release: similar to the first release, but more experimental.

Over the years, the way I’ve used the Internet has changed: initial discovery through a modem and AOL, creating my own little space on a local ISP’s at /~username, always-on broadband in college, and then residential service that I’ve now had for nearly 2 decades.

Once you’re online all the time, you start using it a lot more. I’ve used the popular services everyone else uses, like Google and Wikipedia, but also toyed with running my own services on some server somewhere, usually shared. Issues of privacy and security are definitely relevant here, but customization and control are even more important to me.

In the past few months, I’ve been able to complete some new music, and I guess making a blog post about that is something people do, so…here it is.

I’m 40 years-old and I’ve been working on dev of some sort or another for two-and-a-half decades. I have a reliable career, but still have time to work on toy projects for fun when I want, and yet lately…I have not been interested.

Now what?

All right. It’s 2021. I’ve been making music since I was a teenager back in the mid-90s. I’m now 40 years-old and have finished dozens of releases in a variety of styles. What else is there to do?

Well, I’m glad I asked myself that!