Rebuilding my website with Eleventy đź”—
Screenshot of the homepage for posterity. Try changing the color theme :-) (function() { const theme = document.querySelector('html').getAttri [...]
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Screenshot of the homepage for posterity. Try changing the color theme :-) (function() { const theme = document.querySelector('html').getAttri [...]
My brother, Matt, and I decided to explore our fairly different musical tastes and do a song swap. What follows is my reaction to a song of his choice [...]
No one is ever going to invent a Blake’s Life Simulator. Well, probably not. I can imagine some quantum computer of the future that allows you to simu [...]
I don’t link to it often but I do have an archive of my old disability blog. It used to have its own domain and everything. I did my best to make sure [...]
For two years in a row I’ve taken some time off at the end of the year to rest and relax and, most importantly, to work on personal projects. I’ve beg [...]
I always feel like nothing much happened during the year. I’m not a super active person in terms of getting out and doing things so when I try to thin [...]
In the fall of 2022, I started using Twitter more. I don’t know why; probably a curious desire to see how bad Elon Musk would screw it up. To make it [...]
I’m supposed to be frantically writing a story for National Novel Writing Month. But I also have a streak of posting to my blog every month this year [...]
Links and stuff Here’s quick list of links to the stuff I mention in the talk. Scroll down for the full text. This page is also accessible at . Timest [...]
I’m not a functional programming guru by any means, but I have a passing curiosity and I’ve been trying to learn more about it. I recently dealt with [...]
In late October 2019, I desperately scoured the NaNoWriMo forums searching for creative inspiration ahead of November’s big writing event.[1] At some [...]
One web browser is plenty for most folks but you might find yourself needing more for various reasons. For instance, here is a handful of activities I [...]
I had an annoying situation where, when my AirPods connected to my Mac, they would take over as the active input device (ie, microphone). I didn’t wan [...]
In high school, I still had the ability to handwrite, albeit with some difficulty. Toward the end of high school in the early aughts, I was given use [...]
On June 16, 2023 a storm rolled through Mississippi. Violent straight-line winds and, possibly, a tornado caused several telephone poles in my subdivi [...]
One of my favorite game developers, Zachtronics, released their final game, Last Call BBS, a little while back. And in true Zachtronics fashion it fus [...]
I don’t talk about this often, but I use a team of caregivers to help with all of my daily personal care needs. I’m fortunate enough to be on a progra [...]
Pretty soon after learning CSS and building my first few websites without table layouts (yes I’m old) I stumbled across the world of CSS frameworks. T [...]
I’ve noticed an alarming UI trend over the last five years or so. Apps are neglecting, misusing, or outright omitting the scrollbar from their interfa [...]
I live a fairly boring dorky, life, often spending my non-working hours engaged in various projects. In 2022, I had a relatively prolific creative spu [...]
Update: I gave a talk about this at MagnoliaJS 2023. Home-cooked apps are the kind you make for yourself that solve your own problems. Much like a hom [...]
I’ve never read a novel in which the main character was someone with SMA. As a person with SMA, I’ve always wanted to, though. The First Thing About Y [...]
Monospaced fonts are the kind that most folks probably associate with a typewriter. It just looks like typewriter text. Programmers often use monospac [...]
I’ve been using plain text notetaking applications for over a decade now. Before that I used Evernote, and before that I didn’t really keep any digita [...]
Scrolling is hard. I can’t quite use the scroll wheel on my mouse[1] so my options for scrolling are either the keyboard (arrow keys or page up/down) [...]
I stumbled upon the synthwave genre[1] when a friend of mine sent me a link to The Midnight’s America Online track on YouTube. I became a little obses [...]
This is an article version of my MagnoliaJS 2021 talk. You can download the slides here. I often use the phrase “coding by voice” to quickly describe [...]
In hindsight, I can’t believe anyone paid money[1] for the first version of d20, which I released in September 2016. But they did, and those few sales [...]
Web development provides opportunities to work on different kinds of projects, learn all sorts of things, and dive deeply into specific areas of inter [...]
There are a lot of web hosting options. You’ve got popular serverless platforms like Netlify and Zeit Now. If you’re using WordPress, you’ve got fully [...]
It’s been a little while since I did one of these, but some big things happened in 2019 in my tiny little world, so here we go. New job Starting with [...]
Edit: I’m temporarily hiding this content because writing a review based on a beta (nvUltra) wasn’t fair since the app was unfinished at the time of r [...]
If you make websites, chances are that you work with arrays. A lot. They’re everywhere—a list of posts, a list of followers, a list of links. But work [...]
Static sites continue to be popular with web developers, a trend that, as far as I can tell, began several years ago[1]. I joined that trend back in 2 [...]
Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon. The concepts remain the same but the scripts probably won’t work o [...]
Edit 02/2021: this article was written about what is now a legacy version of Talon. The concepts remain the same but the scripts probably won’t work o [...]
For years, macOS lacked a proper on-screen keyboard. The built-in Keyboard Viewer provided little relief. Many disabled macOS users turned to a third- [...]
Several years ago, Safari shipped with a terrible, over-the-top new tab page that showed your recently visited sites as a giant TV grid. It even had t [...]
I joined Facebook in April 2005 shortly after it was opened up to Mississippi State students. Despite being an early Facebook supporter, I deleted my [...]
Last year, when I read this satire of modern web development, I chuckled. When the npm left-pad dependency controversy left many npm projects unable t [...]
.inline-svg { max-width: 100%; } #ex1-logo-wrap * { transform-box: fill-box; } #ex1-btn:hover rect { fill: #ccc; cursor [...]
.inline-svg { max-width: 100%; } #ex1-logo-wrap *, #ex2-logo-wrap * { transform-box: fill-box; } #ex1-btn:hover rect, #ex2-btn:ho [...]
In 2006 I switched to the Mac after being a Windows user for about 10 years. December this year marks my 10-year anniversary as a Mac user. When I rea [...]
I’ll occasionally mention in passing the various alternatives to Google that I use for web browsing, search, and email, but I haven’t talked about it [...]
I used to be a vanilla JavaScript guy, mainly because I took an excellent JavaScript course at Mississippi State. I put off learning jQuery until I co [...]
Monopoly gets a bad rap. Though many gaming enthusiasts will turn their noses at the “Property trading game from Parker Brothers,” it remains one of t [...]
<img src="https://blakewatson.com/uploads/2019/05/1.png" alt="Frame 1: person at counter says, 'I will take a cup of your light roast, please. Frame 2 [...]
As a developer, one tool stands above the rest as the most essential — the almighty text editor. I’ve been a long time user of Panic’s fantastic code [...]
I’ve owned this little space on the web for a decade. The designs changed radically from version to version. Whatever branding was present changed wit [...]
Smart quotes (i.e., “curly quotes”) are a must-have for me. If I were designing a CMS, smart quotes would be included by default. Alas, wok does not i [...]
I had a conversation with a co-worker of mine, who is in video production, about what it’s like to watch TV shows and movies when you know so much abo [...]
I was thrilled with the idea of pivoting my site from a freelancer’s pitch to a developer’s journal. I really wanted to get back to basics. At its hea [...]
This website started out as a “personal homepage” back when those were still a thing. It was ugly because I was still learning the basics of graphic d [...]