Feed - Personal Webpage of Blake Watson

NaNoWriMo is dead, long live NaNoWriMo! 🔗

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) entered my life in 2010. I was fresh out of grad school and unemployed. I was talking to a friend of mine who [...]

Understanding, not slop, is what’s interesting about LLMs 🔗

Now that LLMs have been around for a little while, we can discern what they’re good at and what they’re not. Clearly they are good at using a lot of e [...]

I changed my fonts after six years of using Cloud.typography 🔗

For years, I’ve used Hoefler&Co.’s webfont service, Cloud.typography, for several of my websites—including, until today, this one. I purchased Operato [...]

blakewatson.com turns 20 🔗

Nowadays I’m used to signing up for services and discovering that the username blakewatson is already taken—yes I’m one of those people who uses their [...]

Your freeform digital character sheet for D&D 5e 🔗

My first foray into digital character sheets was the 5th edition form-fillable PDF, the official ones from Wizards of the Coast. Those quickly became [...]

40 🔗

I don’t know how it got here so fast. I feel behind in life for many reasons, not the least of which is my late start to being employed. But many peop [...]

A decade of employment 🔗

May 4 is a special day. Not only because it’s Star Wars day, but because it was on that day in 2015 that I was hired for my first full-time job. Today [...]

I’m fascinated by the scale of things in space 🔗

I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’ [...]

My computer treats me like a computer 🔗

I’m coming up to a curve in the road. If I’m honest, I’ve already started the curve. My ability to use a hardware keyboard left me a long time ago, bu [...]

Introducing A Fine Start version 3 🔗

Chrome Web Store banner image In my last post I mentioned that I was working on a rewrite of my *checks notes…* eight-year-old (!) browser extension. [...]

IndexedDB made easy like localStorage 🔗

I’m nearly done rewriting my browser extension, A Fine Start, moving away from Vue 2 and using vanilla JavaScript. I’m calling this the final rewrite, [...]

Things I got from specific people 🔗

Sometimes it surprises me how things that I consider essential in my life—things that form parts of my identity—might have never found me. Only though [...]

2024: my year in review 🔗

Well, here we are again—another year. They seem to go by faster and faster, and this one in particular did. I’m just now getting used to the number 20 [...]

Alpine.js for home-cooked apps 🔗

I’m a big fan of home-cooked apps—a term I first heard from author Robin Sloan and have since run with. A home-cooked app is one that you create for y [...]

The making of HTML for People 🔗

On Thursday, October 10, I released HTML for People into the wild. I emailed the 300-ish people who had signed up to be notified and then posted on Ma [...]

Where I’m at with notetaking apps 🔗

I switch notetaking apps constantly. It’s a problem I’ve had for a long time now. Unfortunately, I’ve probably spent more time hopping around notes ap [...]

SMA Chat Discord server and other communities 🔗

Spinal muscular atrophy is pretty rare. There aren’t many of us out there relative to other conditions. I always enjoy connecting with people that hav [...]

Monster of the Week: Game introduction and rules summary 🔗

The following is a modified version of a writeup I did for my players in a play-by-post game we’ve just started on Discord. I wrote it to give the pla [...]

My home-cooked app for online bookmarks 🔗

I did a bit of a design refresh Two years ago this month, I decided to make my own little app for keeping bookmarks. I’m a longtime customer of Pinbo [...]

Mimicking e-ink with macOS 🔗

For several years now I have been wondering how I might fit an e-ink display into my workflow. It’s not as simple as just getting one of the cool e-in [...]

Rebuilding my website with Eleventy 🔗

Screenshot of the homepage for posterity. Try changing the color theme :-) (function() { const theme = document.querySelector('html').getAttri [...]

Song Swap: Kayama by Karl Jenkins 🔗

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 [...]

Use your Mac the way I do: a thought experiment 🔗

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 [...]

Things I miss 🔗

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 [...]

Building our own private Discord knockoff 🔗

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 [...]

2023: my year in review 🔗

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 [...]

omg.lol: an oasis on the internet 🔗

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 [...]

Default apps, 2023 🔗

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 [...]

MagnoliaJS 2023: The joys of home-cooked apps 🔗

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 . PDF sl [...]

Fancy forEach with functional programming in JavaScript 🔗

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 [...]

100 ways to generate a story idea 🔗

In late October 2019, I desperately scoured the NaNoWriMo forums searching for creative inspiration ahead of November’s big writing event.[1] At some [...]

Multi-browser workflow on macOS with Choosy 🔗

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 [...]

Homebrew package for setting specified audio input device 🔗

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 [...]

My journey with the Chubon keyboard layout 🔗

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 [...]

The fragile nature of my life’s work 🔗

On June 16, 2023 a storm rolled through Mississippi. Violent straight-line winds and, possibly, a tornado caused several telephone poles in my subdivi [...]

I made a web-based version of Sawayama Solitaire 🔗

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 [...]

A home-cooked app for hiring personal caregivers 🔗

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 [...]

Surveying the landscape of CSS micro-frameworks 🔗

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 [...]

Neglecting the scrollbar: a costly trend in UI design 🔗

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 [...]

2022: my year in review 🔗

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 [...]

The joys of home-cooked apps 🔗

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 [...]

SMA in fiction: The First Thing About You 🔗

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 [...]

Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing 🔗

Monospaced fonts are the kind that most folks probably associate with a typewriter. It just looks like typewriter text. Programmers often use monospac [...]

Thinking in rich text 🔗

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 [...]

The powerful accessibility of the customizable web 🔗

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) [...]

Introducing synthwave.live, a nostalgic musical odyssey 🔗

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 [...]

Speaking in code: hands-free input with Talon 🔗

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 [...]

The making of d20 version 3 🔗

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 [...]

Finishing side projects 🔗

Web development provides opportunities to work on different kinds of projects, learn all sorts of things, and dive deeply into specific areas of inter [...]

Why I host my websites with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET 🔗

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 [...]

2019: My Year in Review 🔗

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 [...]

Why I chose Simplenote over Standard Notes and nvUltra 🔗

Edit, Sep. 29, 2024: I redacted this article for the last few years because it was unfair of me to review an app in beta against other apps that weren [...]

How to: array reduce in JavaScript and PHP 🔗

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 [...]

Unpopular opinion: switching to WordPress in 2019 🔗

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 [...]

Playing Minecraft by voice with Talon 🔗

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 [...]

Writing and coding by voice with Talon 🔗

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 [...]

Writing and coding with the macOS Accessibility Keyboard 🔗

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- [...]

My answer to the gratuitous new tab page 🔗

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 [...]

Why I left Facebook 🔗

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 [...]

An ode to web pages 🔗

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 [...]

2016: My year in review 🔗

.inline-svg { max-width: 100%; } #ex1-logo-wrap * { transform-box: fill-box; } #ex1-btn:hover rect { fill: #ccc; cursor [...]

SVG logo animation with Anime.js 🔗

.inline-svg { max-width: 100%; } #ex1-logo-wrap *, #ex2-logo-wrap * { transform-box: fill-box; } #ex1-btn:hover rect, #ex2-btn:ho [...]

A decade of Mac 🔗

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 [...]

How to lessen your exposure to Google 🔗

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 [...]

Better UI components with KnockoutJS 🔗

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 [...]

A geek's defense of Monopoly 🔗

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 [...]

Why Darth Vader can't be a barista 🔗

<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 [...]

5 Sublime Text packages that make it a little more like Coda 🔗

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 [...]

New personal mark 🔗

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 [...]

Hard refresh 🔗

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 [...]

Personal Webpage of Blake Watson