I recently created Cranban , a local-first kanban board that stores the board’s data in a markdown file on your computer. Its got the drag and drop simplicity of your favorite project management tools, but a very simple backend (just text!) that is easy to keep in source control, and update by hand when you want to. Because all of the data is on your computer in a simple format, it’s a great tool…
The original vision for the world wide web was a read/write medium. A few years ago I thought, “what if an HTML file could update itself?” When I first started making goofy web pages many years ago, the index.html file felt magical. It felt like the file was the website, and a few .html files in a directory were a little community of pages. Over time, working with things like PHP and WordPress,…
Last year before HTML Energy 's HTML Day in San Francisco I had the idea to iterate on some of my previous projects like Whiteboard Email , and make both an app that would do OCR on HTML, and a website to host truly “hand-written” HTML. That became IRL HTML and it was good enough to make some very simple websites! The published website and the hand written source code, we realized that some…
I have long been a fan of frontend-only websites, usually single-page apps, that are able to persist state in sharable URLs despite not having a database or a backend. One of the more complex projects I used this technique for was my Crossword Puzzle Editor , which stores an entire puzzle, both clues and correct answers in the URL hash. However, when I composed a small puzzle and shared it with a…
After learning a little bit more about web accessibility last year I had been exploring some of the less common HTML elements, and making changes to this website, like wrapping the text of the posts on this blog in <article> tags and adding a <main> tag in the website’s layout templates (this website is built using Eleventy ). I had previously done some work to make sure that <figure> and…
In the Fall of 2020 I participated in a 12 week batch at the Recurse Center . While I had a lot of previous experience working remotely, both before and during the pandemic, RC was the first time where I was communicating with people in more than 1 or 2 other time zones. I now work at a fully remote company, mostly spread over the 4(ish) U.S. time zones, but with a few people permanently or…
Like most of the world, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home lately. Over the winter I was experimenting with building my own web-based digital tools, like an app to track articles and books I was reading. I initially thought I would need to buy hosting space to have the app accessible, but realized I mostly needed to use it when I was at home anyway, so a URL that only existed on my local…
Participating in a batch at the Recurse Center is something that I’ve thought on-and-off about doing since I found out about it (then called Hacker School) sometime between 2013 and 2015, but it just never seemed like the right time to leave my job and its subsidized health insurance until I was laid off (what turned out to be) early on in the pandemic. I had as recently as January 2020 been…
Earlier this week the NYC MTA released a new digital-first map . The Curbed exclusive that announced its release accurately portrays it as a strange child of both the 1972 map design by Massimo Vignelli and the current “paper” map . One feature of the new map (though it’s harder than it should be to notice at first) is real-time visualizations of each train in the system. I’ve been working on a…
I just finished my first week as part of the Fall 1 '20 batch at Recurse Center . I tried to split my time between being social and building skills that I want to use for future projects. The social aspect of RC is interesting because this batch is being conducted remotely. My batch at RC started exactly 5 months after my last day in an office, and something I had been thinking about over the last…