The Links Of Alan

Hello! Welcome to my links page.

This page originally included a piece called How To Grow Your Digital Garden With Sub-Domains. It's worth a read if you're looking to get started with your own digital garden.

I'm on Twitch, Mastodon and occasionaly do a podcast. But, the real point of this page is the various sub-domains that make up my Digital Garden. Here's the places I put stuff on the web (some of them don't have much, but that's how gardens grow)

alanwsmith.com

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.

Are You Currently Alive

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.

ASCII Art

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.

AWS API Price List Values

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.

Blender Chess Pieces

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.

Bright Screen Flash Alert

Designed primarily for streams who work in dark mode. This plays a little yelling sound for chat when they hit a page without it.

Cloudinary Image Maker

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.

D3 Playground

A place to mess around with D3. Just getting started on this one: TODO: Move this one to d3-cookbook

Decovar Random

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).

EC2 Blender Renderer

Taking a look at what it would cost to use Amazon AWS EC2 cloud computers to render Blender 3D images

EC2 Simplified Price List

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.)

Fonts and Colors

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.

Hacking

This is what hacking looks like. Also, another site that got 500 for charity as part of Dusty Domains

Horsevatars

An experiment in making multi-color avatars for Frontend Horse

HTML Only Animation

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)

HTML Only Display Board

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

HTML Only Maze

Another of the six experiments to see what can be done with HTML alone. No JavaScript. No CSS. Just tags (including some deprecated ones)

HTML Only Pixel Art

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

HTML Only Random Pattern

A grid with random colors. The sixth experiment with no javascript, css, or images

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas!

A collection of ideas for programming projects if you need something to help get you started

JavaScript Playground

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

Letters, Letters, Letters!

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. )

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 :-)

Manic Scroll

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

Markdown Table Maker

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)

Minecraft Notes

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

MonoCrack

monocrack.alanwsmith.com

A little game where you decrypt texts (Currently Offline)

Next.js Playground

My place to mess around with NextJs to figure out how it works - TODO: Move to Next.js Cookbook

ngrok Quick QR Code

A quick place to send ngrok urls to your phone via qr codes

photos.alanwsmith.com

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

QR Code Clock

I wanted to see what would happen if you encoded time into a QR code. This is it

Reader For Docs

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.

Roboto Random

This is an experiment with the Roboto Flex variable font. Every second and a half, one of the thirteen adjustable parameters is updated randomly

Roll. Tide. Roll.

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

Rust Notes

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.

Static HTML Site Template

My basic template for starting sites without frameworks. Has sample favicons and Open Graph image calls and will eventually have CSS and JS samples

SurfTech.tv

surftech.tv

This is a little project I built for myself so that when I've got a some time to watch a tech video during lunch I don't have to worry about finding one. This just plays a random one for me. Still have a bunch of features to add to this, but the basic functionality is nice

Tailwind Playground

Messing around with TailwindCSS to figure out how things work

The Art Of Alan

Historically, I've been a photographer. These days, I'm getting into Processing and Blender. This is where I'm posting those pieces.

The Million Portrait Project

It's been on hiatus, and doesn't have a lot there yet, but this is my long term photography project. (Fair warning that the site isn't responsive. I didn't know how to do that when I made it)

The Name(s) Of My New Band

I'm always on the look out for band names. I've started collecting them here

The Pod Of Alan Podcast

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

The Shiny Blog Of Jack Torrance

An homage to The Shining. It's also what I had my site doing way back in 2001

The Slides Of Alan

Gonna start putting slide decks here for talks and videos

Tutorial Thoughts

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

Typing Rust

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.

Yabai Automation

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

Your Device Pixel Ratio

A single serving site that shows your current Device Pixel Ratio