Troy writes about web development and being a person.
I'm cleaning up my site and realized I never made a post about Gonk, a silly messaging service I made. You may be wondering why it's called "Gonk." I, too, am wondering that. It's an inside joke from years ago at this point. You may also be wondering what it is you can do on Gonk. Well, you send honks with Gonk, of course. What is a "honk?" A honk is a little note composed of a sound clip and a…
I read this post from Keenan and felt seen . From their post: When I listen to music, I can hear the individual words. I can sing along to the song (or at the very least reproduce close approximations to the sounds I hear). I can latch on to refrains. But interpreting meaning from any of this is, at best, a futile endeavor. I do find this strange, considering how deeply I feel music at an…
I've been giving my site a fresh look recently. It mostly involved stylesheet updates with a touch of dependency management and site simplification, but I got overwhelmed by the unknowns in how my existing webmention system worked [1] and wanted to do something that felt more comfortable. Chris Burnell's eleventy-cache-webmentions has been my plugin-of-choice for handling webmentions up to this…
CDs, vinyl records, DVDs, VHS tapes, video games. Blockbuster, Best Buy, your local video store. I miss physical media. I don't personally want to own items of each format I listed above; I have long stopped owning CDs in favor of vinyl (hopefully with an accompanying digital download) or purchases from Bandcamp. I'm moreso talking about the industry and culture of physical media, of collections…
Need a blog post right now ? Look no further! I made a web component called word-salad . The way it works is you give it a set of words and it gives you a new set of words. You can ask it for single words mashed up into a mess, or full sentences generated from single words to create a multi-mess. I'm here to help you write your next blog post in my voice as I've already supplied word-salad with…
Think about the last time you were out with friends or family and there were drinks in front of each of you. When slight breaks in a conversation happened, did you all reach for and take a drink at the same time in that moment of stillness? It's possible the venn diagram for people reading this post and people who have noticed this is two separate circles. I imagine we instinctually take that time…
I mentioned in a previous post how I display any song I'm currently listening to on my site [1] , but I want to set the record straight about something in particluar with that feature. TL;DR I fetch data from the ListenBrainz API, but that might not mean the song you see is a song I'm choosing to hear. Everything I've ever listened to since 2021 (that I've been able to scrobble) is sent to…
I read this article from The Verge - "Please don't film me in 2023" - and would also like to not be filmed for content without my consent. In one of the examples, it took a creepier path where being filmed and posted online unknowingly about something innocuous led to a stranger online identifying and notifying the subject. This quote from the article compares the TikTok format to other…
As seen on a bike at the gym: Error is : 04-B0 I searched the internet for this code plus keywords related to workout bikes and got nothing . I didn't manage to get a picture of the bike this time, but I hope someone out there knows immediately what I'm talking about and can let me know what this means.
I tend to get hung up on creating the perfect blogging experience. Like "oh, a CMS is designed for that, so I should set one up." But that's a lot of work. More work than I ultimately care to take on. I can continue on with my current workflow of using markdown, but sometimes I do need HTML that isn't covered by the spec. Luckily, markdown accepts HTML! But then it's no longer in the perfect,…
The tinkerer in me - the same one who enjoys spending hours of his weekend trying out a fancy new framework even if he knows he'll never really use it - has latched onto the idea of embracing the indie web . It's a lovely concept/movement/way of life, but it isn't without its complications. You can't blame it much for not being too user friendly. The fact of the matter is there's (currently) a lot…
"This Is Why We Don't Have A Podcast": a host talks to a different acquaintance every week for an hour on a podcast with no format. Together, they (and the audience) learn over this hour why they haven't already started a podcast through the awkwardness of talking to someone you don't know very well. This assumes the two of you have known of each other for enough time that it's safe to say you'd…
I decided to try and refactor Plvylist using Lit the other day. This is the second time I've attempted such a project. The first time was a mistake because I had no prior experience using Lit and I barely understood how my own web component worked to begin with. I've been working with Lit a lot at my current position at TRP, and with time to kill waiting for a flight home I figured I'd make…
We stayed in a house at the beach this past week as part of the family's yearly vacation. This year's house had both a theater and arcade room, and I'm here to talk about an error message I saw displayed on one of its arcade machines. 1942 Data Error That's all it said. I did the first thing anyone in my position would have done: took to DuckDuckGo for the answer. You know what I found? Nothing .…
When I started my Eleventy journey, I was still very new to web development. I'd see posts about cool CSS resets or script packages and want to use them, only to be stumped on how to get from npm i to using it in my static site website. Well, this month I was doing some Googling on something I've already forgotten and found an issue in the 11ty repo where someone asked this exact question, months…
I was surprised by how difficult it was to find a full-blown tutorial for making a Sudoku app with Vue. On the contrary, the internet is overflowing with React versions of Sudoku, so I decided to follow one of those and port it into Vue. Matt Biilmann of Netlify fame made a Sudoku React app that can be found over on the freeCodeCamp YouTube channel, and it's this video that was the entry point to…
Are all your friends starting podcasts? Does that make you never want to start your own? Proclaim your dedication to never start your own podcast. That's the first line of text you'll find on I Don't Have A Podcast . I started said website after a night of talking podcasts and how overwhelming the podcast landscape is. You can find a podcast for literally everything you could ever want. Maybe it…
I find myself thinking too much about my projects; I want anything I make to be the best it can be. The sentiment is nice, but takes a lot of time in practice. Time, patience, mental energy, etc. - you name it. To be on a journey of perfection means to never end that journey. Everything I make and put on the internet is a representation of me in one form or another, so the goal is that…
We've been working on some new music this year. I promise we'll have an EP of new originals later this year, but we thought a collection of covers from last year's pop hits would be a fun way to hold everyone over. You can find the entire set over on our Bandcamp or streaming on our website . The hits include: "cardigan" - Taylor Swift "Afterglow" - Ed Sheeran "Always Do" - The Kid Laroi "Be Kind"…
I found this video years ago but never saved it. Since I recently found out HBO Max has the first eight seasons of Whose Line Is It Anyway? , this video resurfaced in my mind. After far too many queries on search engines like "colin.mp4," "colin.avi," and "colin mochrie meme dance gif," the letters "swf" came back to me. I bookmarked the video, downloaded it to local storage, and am now writing a…
My first introduction to the internet was being given access to AOL's kid-friendly version, KOL, and it was then that I had to decide on my first screen name. I admit to not having the best recollection of how things went from there, but I feel like it was perfectly fine to have many screen names across platforms instead of being locked to one . When I created my first real email address, I…
It's safe to say I'm the biggest swiftie in Front Royal, so when we decided to write and release a covers album, it was no surprise I voted for a Taylor Swift tune. Cardigan is one of five songs being released in this covers series, so keep an eye out for the next ones. cardigan by Front Royal Check out Front Royal at all these locations: Bandcamp Facebook Spotify Instagram Twitter YouTube
I don't need to reiterate what 2020 is like. My friends and I, you may know us as Front Royal - the band, not the town - were sitting restless in our separate homes after the release of our debut LP , so we decided to cover one of our favorite songs: Sweet Talk by Dear and the Headlights. Watch the video here: Play Video: Sweet Talk by Dear and the Headlights Cover, by Front Royal
I don't write as much music as I used to. There's a combination of reasons for why that is or may be, but their irrelevant to this post. Though I may not sit down and produce a song in its entirety that often, it's a given that I'll end up recording a snippet of a future song during my practice sessions. Those recordings - typically a video so I can see myself doing the thing - end up in my Google…