Hello! Welcome to my projects and links page!
I'm a huge fan of the Digital Garden approach to websites. One of the things I've found most helpful for growing mine is the liberal use of sub-domains for exploring ideas. It's incredibly freeing to have a clean slate to play with when working on something new.
Here's my current list (fair warning: some of these are works-in-progress that don't yet do what they say on the tin):
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867-5309
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Quick link for the classic number. Can't belive someone owns 867-5309.com and isn't doing this with it. The main point of the page is to experiment with a technique for having a blurred background based off the video that's playing
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alanwsmith.com
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The place where it all began. This is my main site/blog. It's personal so I post about whatever happens to have my interest. Music, movies, code, having bipolar disorder, whatever. It's also not organized right now. It's just an alphabetical listing of links. Improving that is definitely on the to-do list
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Are You Currently Alive
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Build this one in the spirit of Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The World Yet.com for Netlify's 2021 Dusty Domains. The little page was worth $500 to charity
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The Art Of Alan
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Historically, I've been a photographer. These days, I'm getting into Processing and Blender. This is where I'm posting those pieces
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AWS API Price List Values
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I had to dig through the AWS pricing APIs while working on an EC2 pricing comparison for blender rendering. It took a while to figure out how to get at the data. This is the initial data set you can use to filter requests. Hoping it helps save folks some time by not having to bang their heads against this part themselves
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Blender Chess Pieces
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I started playing around with Blender to give me something to do that's not coding. Sure, it's still on a computer, but it kicks the visual part of my brain into gear which is a nice change of pace.
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Bluesky
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Bluesky feels like a cross between "original good twitter" and "new, crappy, engagement bait twitter". I'm glad it exists even though I generally prefer mastodon
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Bright Screen Flash Alert
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Designed primarily for streams who work in dark mode. This plays a little yelling sound for chat when they hit a page without it
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Cloudinary Image Maker
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I got tired of trying to assemble Cloudinary urls. Took less time to make this than I spent trying to figure out how to apply text to an image by hand
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Color Scheme Switcher (Vanilla JavaScript)
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Some vanilla JavaScript designed to switch color schemes while preventing a Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC)
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D3 Playground
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A place to mess around with D3. Just getting started on this one: TODO: Move this one to d3-cookbook
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Decovar Random
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This is the second experiment (that I like better) of randomly adjusting a variables on a variable font. This one is Decovar. (The first was Roboto Flex which is linked below)
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Django Notes And Tutorials
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I struggled a lot with the offical Django Tutorial. These are notes, boilerplates, and tutorials I put toghter to teach myself (and hopefully make it easier for other folks to learn)
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EC2 Blender Renderer
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Taking a look at what it would cost to use Amazon AWS EC2 cloud computers to render Blender 3D images
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EC2 Simplified Price List
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I finally got fed up with how difficult it is to figure out EC2 pricing so I put this together. (The specific goal at the time was to price out the different GPU instances to look at blender rendering.)
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Facebookno longer active -
I haven't been on Facebook in years. It's a prime example of enshittification
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Fonts and Colors
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I'm not good at color swabs or fonts in isolation. I built this so I don't have to be. Changes show up directly on the page
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GitHub
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Not everything I do is on GitHub, but a lot of it is. This is your place to go if you want to see what I've been up to with the codes
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GitHub Stars (Web Component)
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A little web component for displaying the GitHub stars for a repo. It wasn't really necessary to build as there's an official GitHub one. It was a good learning project though. Plus, you can change the colors on this one. A feature the official one doesn't have
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Hacking
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This is what hacking looks like. Also, another site that got 500 for charity as part of Dusty Domains
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Horsevatars
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An experiment in making multi-color avatars for Frontend Horse using Cloudinary to automatically generate the images
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HTML Only: Animation
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The forth experiment in the series six of making site/pages relying on only HTML without JavaScript, CSS, or images. This one produces an animation effect by using meta redirect tags to cycle between pages. (Note that you may have to close the page to stop it)
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HTML Only: ASCII Art
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A few famous pieces of art turned into ASCII. This is one of five experiments in making a site out of just HTML. There's no JavaScript, CSS, or image calls. Just the HTML. The idea came from this tweet from whitep4nth3r about HTML only web sites
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HTML Only: Display Board
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This was the fifth of the six experiments is seeing what can be done with only HTML (no JavaScript, CSS, or images). It uses the deprecated marquee tag to create a scrolling text display
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HTML Only: Maze
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Another of the six experiments to see what can be done with HTML alone. No JavaScript. No CSS. Just tags (including some deprecated ones)
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HTML Only: Pixel Art
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This is an experiment to make pixel art using only an HTML table. It's one of six using no JavaScript, CSS, or images. Just the HTML. It was inspired by this tweet from whitep4nth3r
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HTML Only: Random Pattern
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A grid with random colors. The sixth experiment with no javascript, css, or images
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HTML Template
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My latest starter template for making a site without using a third-party framework
(I didn't realize till posting this that I already had the 'static-template' domain set up. That name didn't stick in my head though and I'm cool with starting fresh regardless.)
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Ideas, Ideas, Ideas!
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A collection of ideas for programming projects if you need something to help get you started
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Jack Torrance's Shiny Blog
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An homage to The Shining. It's also what I had my site doing way back in 2001
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JavaScript Playground
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A place for me to mess around with javascript to create snippets for both understanding how things work and to use to copy into other code
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Letters, Letters, Letters!
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You're number one source for links to my letters of the alphabet sites. I made them as part of my "How To Grow Your Digital Garden With Sub-Domains" post. (Here's direct letter access if you're looking for that: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. )
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Links Page <- You Are Here
links.alanwsmith.com -
Pointers to my tools, projects, and playgrounds and a pitch for making sub-domain digital gardens. But you already know that since you're looking at the page :-)
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Low Tide At Sunrise Finder
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I got nerd-sniped with this one. A bird watcher posted how they wanted an app that would show them when sunrise and low tide where within certain times of each other. I was in a headspace where I needed something to mess around with. This was the perfect thing. Got to play around with NOAA.gov data, learn the formula for calculating sunrise (which is way more complex than I anticipated), fight through timezone math, and learn to embed Leaflet maps
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Manic Scroll
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A sample of the notes that I took during a manic bipolar episode. There's nothing particularly profound about them. Just thought it might be interesting to post them. If you ever wanted to see what it looks like during someones brain freaking out, this is it
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Markdown Table Maker
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A super basic table formatter for markdown. Eventually, I'll make it live update and add more features, but it's handy as it is. (Though, I really need to add dark mode)
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Mastodon
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My favorite social network. It took a while to get going on it. I've got a good list of folks I follow now. One of my favorite thigs about it is there's very little 'engagment bait' crap on it
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The Million Portrait ProjectMillionPortraitProject.com -
I have a long term plan of doing a portriat project with the goal of getting my images hung in the National Portrait Gallery. This was the origal site for the project. I let it expire with plans to move it to a sub-domain but haven't set that up yet. So, it's on hiatus
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Minecraft Notes
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My basic collection of minecraft notes so I don't have to look them up every time. Another plain HTML file site that I'll be adding some style too
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MonoCrackmonocrack.alanwsmith.com -
A little game where you decrypt texts (Currently Offline)
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The Name(s) Of My New Band
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I'm always on the look out for band names. I've started collecting them here
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Next.js Playground
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My place to mess around with NextJs to figure out how it works - TODO: Move to Next.js Cookbook
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ngrok Quick QR Code
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A quick place to send ngrok urls to your phone via qr codes
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Only Fans
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You sure you want to click on this one?
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photos.alanwsmith.com
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Photography used to be my thing. It's what I was known for long before I got into code. During the years of getting my ass kicked by mental health issues, it left me. It was gone so long I''d gotten used to the idea that it was gone forever. Now, it's back. This is where I'm posting my stuff
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The Pod Of Alan Podcast
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Home of The Pod Of Alan where I riff on working in public, making stuff, creativity, art, design, education, learning, language, mental health, movies, and music
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QR Code Clock
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I wanted to see what would happen if you encoded time into a QR code. This is it
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Reader For Docs
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The idea behind this one is to make it easier for me to read documentation. Or, really, to keep my place when I'm reading through docs. Right now it's just the Org-mode manual split into individual pages. The key is that it remembers what page I'm on so I just open the site and pick up where I left off
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Roboto Random
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This is an experiment with the Roboto Flex variable font. Every second and a half, one of the thirteen adjustable parameters is updated randomly
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Roll. Tide. Roll
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Gotta have a Roll Tide site. On the TODO list is to figure out the code that keeps all the words in view while filling the page as much as possible
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Rust Notes
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My collection of notes for learning Rust. Publishing the entire set as a stand alone site to help me learn better through the process of writing
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The Slides Of Alan
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This one is aspirational. The idea is to put slide decks here for talks and videos. Though, there's a good chance each slide deck will end up on it's own sub-domain so I've got the option of using different tech for each one
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Social Networks
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Links to the current list of places you can find me on the internet
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Static HTML Site Template
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This was an earlier template I used for starting new static sites on a sub-domain. I don't use it any more. It's just here for reference. See the "HTML Template" above for the one I'm using now
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SurfTech.tvsurftech.tv -
A project I built for when I've got some time to watch a tech video but don't want to have to pick one out. The page picks a random one from a list and loads it automatcially. I let the domain expire. I'll move it to a sub-domain at some point
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SVG Button Maker
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My tool for converting SVGs into accessible HTML/CSS buttons
There's way more to making a button out of an SVG than I realized. With this, remembering it all isn't required
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Tailwind Playground
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Messing around with TailwindCSS to figure out how things work
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Tutorial Thoughts
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I find most coding tutorials frustrating. This is my place to experiment with layouts, designs, and concepts that work with the way my brain works
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Twitch
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Every want to see someone code live? Here's your chance. (I very much go through phases with how much I stream. Going from several times a week to skipping entire months is not uncommon)
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Twitterno longer active -
I haven't been on twitter/x in a long time. It's just gross now
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Typing Rust
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This is my original Rust Notes site where I was going to have a tool to help you type code examples in correctly. I'm punting on it in favor of Rust Notes
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Waveform Display
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A work in progress. Making a waveform display to use when making screen recordings
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Web Component Techniques
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The place where I'm keeping my notes about how to work with web components
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Yabai Automation
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I use Yabai as a tiling window manager on my mac. This page has some scripts I use to automatically move windows around based on which monitors I have connected and what I'm doing
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Your Device Pixel Ratio
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A single serving site that shows your current Device Pixel Ratio
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YouTube
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Lots of randomness here. From Scratch and Minecraft videos to timers and test NASA clips
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YouTube Player (Web Component)
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The web component I use to embed videos on my sites. It provides control buttons for play/pause/stop, mute/unmute, and changing playback speeds. It also sets a data attribute on the body tag that can be used to do things like dim the rest of the page when a video is playing