I started a new job recently, so I’ve been learning and using EmberJS, an open-source JavaScript framework. It’s been over 3 months now, and it’s time to do a retrospective.

Bogdle is my web-based word game, which takes Boggle’s rules (relaxed, currently) mixed with Wordle’s look and daily nature. Each day you get a new 3x3 grid filled with letters that make words from 4 to 8 letters long, with one 9 letters-long word (i.e. the pangram). Find them all and you win the day. Simple, eh?

Easy to understand and play, but while working on version 2 of this app, I realize there’s a lot more to it.

I took a new job recently. I no longer work on Drupal and Angular, but instead this framework called EmberJS that I’m still in the middle of learning.

With a new job comes a new way of handling a large software project, and, if I have to be honest, I think I’ve become significantly better already.

I make web apps. Those web apps can be displayed as their individual URLs in a series of browser tabs. That same browser can also display ALL OF THEM in ONE web site.

While it’s been up for a while, I’ve never blogged about Omni, so here we go.

Over the last few months I’ve made some updates to some of my web apps. Here’s a short overview of those changes, using my very own git commit messages as headers!

Have you ever wanted to just get a quick print out (to the screen) of all the tech that’s on your computer? I’ve been working on a shell script for years that does just that.

December is almost over, bringing us the new year of 2024. However, the last few years have ended with something fun, challenging, and educational for me: a digital advent calendar of puzzles.

I’ve never tried to do anything with Web Assembly before, even though it seems quite exciting. However, while searching the Internet for a way to showcase some old Ruby scripts I wrote once in my early programming days, I came upon this Javascript library that lets you run client-side Ruby in a web page.

And folks…I just had to try it out.

Now that I use Mastodon as my daily social media outlet, I want to automagically share any new posts on my blog as a new toot. My blog is kept in a git repo, and shared on Github, so I figured I could use Github Actions to do this.

Thanks to some digital friends along the way, I was able to create one!

So, NebyooSkate kind of petered out, inspiration-wise (lost interest in gameplay), and technical-wise (not sure how to do the stuff I want to do with it), but it’s available to try out if you’d like.

In its place, a different idea has sprung anew: a roguelike deckbuilding idea.

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.