blakewatson

Seems like people don't like this comment, but I chuckled. Nice one.

The en-dash is for ranges. https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

OP here, yeah I get that! I think the only technical input I had was my prompts for fixing bugs. I'm a web developer, so I have some familiarity with the life cycle of mouse events. Depending on what behaviors I was trying to fix, I could infer what was most likely going on in English, not that I knew how to translate it into Swift code.

But yeah, I'm yelling at clouds right next to you.

Related: This is a nice write-up of how to write reactive jQuery. It's presented as an alternative to jQuery spaghetti code, in the context of being in a legacy codebase where you might not have access to newer frameworks.

https://css-tricks.com/reactive-jquery-for-spaghetti-fied-le...

See also this lovely typeface revival. https://lineto.com/typefaces/valentine

https://blakewatson.com/

Probably not too useful for many in this audience, but I wrote a web book for *absolute beginners* learning HTML. It's very much in the same spirit as the OP's post.

https://htmlforpeople.com/

Yes, this was the one I was thinking of!

TL;DR - The ability of computers to "understand" natural language and intent has staggering implications for accessibility.

I recently hit a 10-year milestone of being employed after many years of trying and failing to get a job.

I can’t get enough of anything that helps me wrap my mind around the scale of objects and distances in the universe.

I recently discovered Epic Spaceman on YouTube, who makes incredible visual comparisons to help understand these scales. https://www.youtube.com/@EpicSpaceman

There’s also Universe Sandbox 2. But tbh this Atlas of Space is more accessible to me due to my various input limitations.

Space Engine let’s you explore the entire observable universe.

I think https://spaceengine.org/ fills part of your request. I haven't played it but I've watched videos about it and it looks like you can jump anywhere around the observable universe and look at any object you want.

I went with "Get started already" :)

Yeah the implication that I guess I didn't make well enough is that it's for anybody who wants to learn it. It’s attainable without needing highly specialized or intensive training.

No I think I will probably keep it focused on HTML. I think my "CSS basics" chapter is as far as I want to go with styling. But I would love to see other folks publish easy-to-understand CSS tutorials.

Yeah, I think you're right about that. I'm not sure whether I want to write something of an appendix myself and link to it, or find something else on the web and link to that.

OP here. Yeah, I was a bit worried about this, and even though I kind of mentioned it in the introduction, I think it deserves more attention. I'm not sure if I want to write something and host it myself, or maybe just point people to some kind of primer on creating files and folders.

Yes! I would love that. I need to update the readme, but I think my strategy would be to place translated chapters in a subfolder, (eg, "/es"). I can configure Eleventy to generate a different nav menu based on the subpath.

OP here. Oooh that’s a good suggestion. Yeah it’s hard to shed the webdev persona and see it through fresh eyes—even though I specifically tried to do just that!

OP here. I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, I hope it finds its way into the hands of non-professionals.

Yeah unfortunately that’s Mastodon pulling from other instances. Here’s the local timeline: https://social.lol/public/local

OP here. I love that little site and I link to it often!

OP here, just wanted to say your tabletop links page is chef's kiss.

Oh wow, you’re right. I wonder what’s up with that.

I’m I love this little challenge. I've participated almost every year since 2010. At the peak of my involvement l was a local organizer (Municipal Liaison). I met a lot of cool people and had a great time at write-ins and such.

It was a good social outlet for me because I have a pretty severe mobility impairment and, long story short, small groups and laid back activities are easier for me to participate in than other things.

I haven't really gotten back into in-person stuff post-COVID, but I still enjoy making November a time to write and hanging out in the local NaNo Discord server. I enjoy perusing the NaNo forums, particularly the Adoption Society, where people offer up plots, characters, running gags, opening lines, chapter-naming schemes, and more for anyone to use.

There's also a bit of fun lore that has developed. For example, if you're stuck, kill a character with the traveling shovel of death ("traveling" because us Wrimos are passing it around). Or find a way to include Mr. Ian Woon (anagram of NaNoWriMo).

NaNoWriMo is different things to different people and I love that about it.

This year and last, I lowered my goal to writing a 20k-word novella. I have difficulty typing and a lower word count makes it a bit easier for me (that makes me a "NaNo rebel" lol I love all the little jokes and stuff).

Good point! I suppose no one is truly independent.

I knew I recognized your name. You created Neat!

I think Ponder is cool! I made something similar for myself, but never got around to supporting more than one text. https://blakewatson.com/scratchpad/

I may be misunderstanding, but I was thinking the commenter meant "ripping" as in ripping a DVD, as opposed to "ripping off of." So "immediately ripped and given away for free" meaning someone shouldn't be able to immediately distribute the recording outside of Netflix.

I have a bunch of these. They are my favorite things to make. I've been making things like this for a long time but I only recently started to appreciate them after discovering this article. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

- I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a system for recruiting and hiring caregivers. (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring...)

- I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go on the timesheets.

- Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my caregivers for any time period on demand.

- I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps...)

- Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY

- I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I made a CLI for selectively publishing notes to the web.

Really most everything I make outside of my day job is for me/family initially, but a lot of it I end up publishing. For example my main side project is A Fine Start (https://afinestart.me/). It actually started as an assistive technology just for me—typing is difficult so I wanted a new tab page with just clickable text links. I used it for a while myself before eventually turning it into a browser extension and service for other people.