Web Portal

Projects

Usable Software

The Wayward Web - A webring. A collaborative effort to map the useful, human parts of the web.
Druthers - Instantly grok your group's priorities with ranked-choice voting. A collaboration with Gavin Morgan.
Culture Machine - The app I wrote to break my YouTube addiction (it worked). Emotionally-stabilizing videos played continuously in an unskippable random sequence.
mdsite - A modern generator for old-school static sites. It turns any tree of Markdown files into a website, complete with auto-generated navigation links. It's also the tool I used to create this webpage!
Taste - Simple, speedy JavaScript test framework
yt - Watch YouTube without ads or tracking. Pairs great with LeechBlock.
hypersearch - Powers the searchbar on this page!

Niche Software

Audition - A command-line tool that keeps the prose description of your conlang up to date with its morphology and lexicon.
The One Grammar to Rule Them All - The Lisp of conlangs. A syntax template for people who don't want to think about syntax anymore.
wwwebring - A fully clientside webring widget for static sites. Powers the Wayward Web.
LynX - My Linux "distro." Re-skins Linux Mint to look and feel like vintage Mac OSX.
autokeyconf - Rebinds shortcut keys system-wide on Linux.
"Frost" theme for Docky - An OSX-style dock for Linux.

Writing

Process to Processes - A draft of my upcoming book about software development
Ben's Guide to Software Development - A newsletter about the book
Bliki - My personal blog/wiki about software, with 250+ topic-focused pages on everything from abstraction to wholeness.

Food

Shopping List

Favorite Recipes

Music

See Channel 3 of Culture Machine

Software Development

The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond. Comprehensive, eloquent, and mind-expanding. If you only read one book on software design and development, this should be it.
Beautiful Software - a course in Christopher Alexander's methods and philosophy, for software people.
Refactoring.com - Martin Fowler's site with descriptions of the refactorings from his book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code.
Dreamsongs.com - Richard P. Gabriel's personal site, containing his poetry and essays about Lisp, Christopher Alexander, and software.
MemoryManagement.org - Approaches to garbage collection and more.
Pivotal Alumni Codex - Resources compiled by former Pivots, including lists of recommended tech videos, Pivotal Labs-like consultancies, developer tools and newsletters. Maintained by Davis W. Frank.
The C2 Wiki - the original Wiki. Code by Ward Cunningham, text by many contributors.
Eloquent Javascript - web book by Marijn Haverbeke

Reference

UnicodePlus.com - search for unicode characters.
man7.org - Unix manual pages
A Complete Guide to Flexbox - on css-tricks.com

Web Hosting

Neocities - Free, indie, social web hosting. A spiritual successor to Geocities.
EU.org - Free subdomain names for individuals and nonprofits.
surge.sh - Put any folder of HTML files on the web instantly.

UI/UX Design

Theory

Laws of UX - Facts about humans that every designer should keep in mind!

Turpentine

When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

— Garson Kanin, attributed to Pablo Picasso

GifCities - Archived gifs from Geocities websites.
Hero Patterns - tiling SVG patterns for your website background
Pattern Monster - even more tiling SVG patterns for your website background
nnnoise - SVG Noise Generator - create fractal noise or turbulence dynamically with SVG. A very network-efficient replacement for PNG or JPEG textures.
Grainy Gradient Playground - dithered gradients for a retro (or is it futuristic?) look

Tools I Use

Web / JavaScript Developer Tools

Vite - Fast, easy-to-use dev server for single-page apps. Built-in hot-reloading and TypeScript compilation, among other features.
Yarn - package manager for NodeJS. Replaces npm.
Bun - blazing fast, but somewhat crash-prone replacement for node and npm that also implements some web APIs (but no DOM). I use Bun to run mdsite and Taste tests.
ESLint - I am experimenting with eslint.style as a JavaScript/TypeScript formatter, replacing Prettier. See also Anthony Fu's post "Why I don't use Prettier".
Prettier - because it's still the easiest formatter to set up, and I agree with 95% of its choices.

JavaScript Libraries

Preact
Marked - Markdown-to-HTML converter for NodeJS

Editors

Visual Studio Code (vscode) - Pretty good out of the box, configurable, versatile, and free.
JetBrains - Expensive, but they come with pretty incredible code intelligence and refactoring tools. Lots of stuff you'd have to configure yourself or use plugins for in other editors "just works" in JetBrains.

Tools I Might Use Someday

pnpm - Replaces npm.
zed - An editor designed for remote pair programming. Unfortunately, there's no Linux support yet, though one can build from source on Linux.

List of Lists of Links

Software Development
Life De-FAANGed
Languages and Linguistics
J.R.R. Tolkien
Alexandrian Architecture and Philosophy
Heroes of Might and Magic IV - Maps and documentation for the classic computer strategy game.
History of Technology
Web Archives and Archiving Tools

General Reference

Quote Investigator

DuckDuckGo Bang Cheatsheet

Bangs are shortcuts that let you search a specific site with DuckDuckGo. They start with an exclamation point, like !yt for YouTube. Just include one in your search to use it.

!mdn - Mozilla Developer Network
!yt - YouTube
!npm - NPMJS.com
!g - Google
!gh - GitHub
!cc - Creative Commons image & audio search

Webring

Settings

Automatically focus the search field on page load.