Building Agentically and Celebrating Watches / / No Comments I’ve shared past experiences with vibe coding and it’s been a fascinating way to experiment and build on a small scale, but while it works well for POCs and other small utilities (I won’t say ‘toys’ as I’ve built useful, if small, things now multiple times), it isn’t really a "process" and not one that would work over a project with a longer time frame. This is where "Agentic Development" comes in. It’s not always referred to as such and it’s a huge topic, but let me give you my opinion on it and then demonstrate how I used it to build my newest project, I Watch Watches. Agentic Development in a Nutshell Vibe coding is... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Agentically, building, Celebrating, Watches
Building Custom Form Selection Boxes – Working on Accessibility / / No Comments Whenever I find myself needing to update a previous blog post, I either correct it inline and add a small note on top, for small tweaks, or write a whole new piece for larger changes. My last blog post talked about how to use CSS to style a "block" such that it acted like a form radio button. When I worked on that demo, I was a bit worried about accessibility. I did one quick check with an online tool, and thought I was ok. I was not. When I shared my post on LinkedIn, Kevin Bonett shared this feedback with me: I would argue that, despite using correct semantic HTML, the “custom” radio buttons are inaccessible. If you’re a sighted keyboard user, how will you know... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: accessibility, Boxes, building, custom, form, Selection, working
Building Custom Form Selection Blocks – no JS, all CSS / / No Comments I apologize for what may be a slightly misleading title. The topic for this post is something I’ve had on my list of things to explore for some time now, and while I wait for the new job to start, I’ve found myself with time to kill. Let me explain what I’m talking about and hopefully it will make a bit more sense. You are, dear reader, familiar with form controls and how to build forms both big and small. One type of user interface I’ve seen from time to time is the ability to select an item where the "item" is an arbitrary block of code. What do I mean by that? Typically a choice element in a form is either a select, checkbox, or radio set. But I’ve seen... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Blocks, building, custom, form, Selection
Building a Form Handling Service in Val Town / / No Comments Many years ago, I made the switch from building primarily app-server backed sites (using Node, ColdFusion, PHP, etc) to fully static sites using tools like Jekyll, Hugo, and Eleventy. For the most part, it was a great shift in how I build, but there were a few things I had to figure out in that new world – one of them was simple form handling. While I could have used serverless just fine, it felt like overkill. Luckily, there were a few services out there that catered to this need. You would simply use a unique action for your form and that service would handle collecting the form data, emailing it to you, and redirecting the user back to the site. A great example of this, and one I used... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, form, handling, service, Town
Building a Simple Markdown PWA App / / No Comments While I didn’t share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need – I work with Markdown files all the time but didn’t have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me – the size of the bundled app. I created both a Mac and Windows distribution and both were around 90 megs. That’s not huge of course, but still felt like a lot for what could – in theory –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Markdown, simple
Building My Own Social Network Poster in Astro / / No Comments Today is a big day for Astro, not only do you get Astro v6 (it just released a few hours ago!), you also get one of my demos! Ok, one of these is more important than the other, but, I’m really excited about v6 and hope to have a demo of the new features to share soon. With that being said, I’m also sharing a demo I started work on a few weeks ago and finally wrapped up this past weekend – Social Beast. What is Social Beast Social Beast is a web app meant to be run locally (although I have some thoughts on that restriction and will share at the end) that handles posting to multiple social networks at once. Right now "multiple" is two: Mastodon Bluesky It doesn’t... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Astro, building, Network, Poster, Social
Building a Bluesky Sentiment Dashboard with Alpine and Chrome AI / / No Comments Good morning, programs! Today I’m sharing yet another example of Chrome’s on-device AI features, this time to demonstrate a "Bluesky Sentiment Dashboard". In other words, a tool that lets you enter terms and then get a report on the average sentiment for posts using that word. I actually did this before (and yes, I forgot until about a minute ago) last year using Transformers.js: Building a Bluesky AI Sentiment Analysis Dashboard. I also built this for Twitter, before it went down the toilet, killed off API access, etc. etc., but I can’t seem to find it in my archives so maybe I’m hallucinating. That being said, earlier this week I thought I’d try building... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine, Bluesky, building, Chrome, dashboard, Sentiment
Building an RSS Aggregator with Astro / / No Comments This weekend I had some fun building a little Astro site for RSS aggregation. It works by the individual user defining a set of feeds they care about and works with a server-side Astro route to handle getting and parsing the feeds. Here’s a quick example. On hitting the site, it notices you haven’t defined any feeds and prompts you to do so: Clicking "Manage Feeds" opens up a dialog (my first time using one with native web platform tech!) where you can add and delete RSS feeds: After you have some specified, the app then calls server-side to fetch and parse the feeds. Items are mixed together and returned sorted by date: Not too shabby looking, either. That’s... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Aggregator, Astro, building