Explaining Myself.
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Web Publishing Has to Stay a Thing
07/26/2025
Desktop web publishing should continue to be a thing. But it can't just be the publishers making it one. It has to be web visitors too. And to make them we have to curate among those left who still remember what "web surfing" in the day, was.
There has to be an appeal among those who still use desktop and laptop PCs or any device where one can comfortably surf, to change how they think about the open web and how they visit websites. How do you get people to deliberately web surf in a world where they are now expected to "go to" not "hop to" digital places, much of which by the way exists in the form of apps.
Blog and link rolls would be one way, but since it would be easy to pollute any centralized web directory with spam and dangerous links, it would have to be extraordinarily well managed in order to be trusted.
Personally curated blog lists are out there though and are intimate to each curator, something the desktop web should be. I almost forgot about my own, but too, Suzy McHale's, or Ryan Barrett's, each of which I offer up as simple examples. The individuals behind these are not professional click-gatherers, they are authentic and use the web to reflect themselves, as the initial publishing homesteaders of the 90s did.
If there were just enough of "us" - me and the rando who still randomly landed here or jumped from their dwindling personal list of active personal blogs and what not - proving all of this was still a thing, the concept might catch a big second wave.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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AI Bringing Old Dreams to Life
07/09/2025
I finally got Stepping Stone developed as a Chrome Extension and it is now published in the Chrome Web Store.
What is it? It's browser navigation tool that let's you pan through a set of bookmark shortcuts. The effect is like, as my tagline goes, "reading your newspaper in some favorite order". Except in digital form of course. Oh - and only on an actual computer desktop. This thing won't work on a phone.
You can read more about it on its "About" page.
The Web Stepper control panel.
I'm less excited that I've published a viable tool for the masses because let's face it, in the time it's taken me to find a path to producing and publishing it since my first iteration in the 90s, people have stopped browsing the web.
There are no masses.
Even so, I was proud of my clunky mid-90s version and wanted to see it live in contemporary form. Even if it might take a niche crowd to ever use it.
The original 1990s something version. It actually worked most of the time!
The kicker is that I didn't actually code this thing in the conventional sense. I happen to lean into Google Gemini and asked, based on recollection of the old one I wrote, if it could produce it. When it shot back that it could, and, even provided some semblance of a working prototype, it was game on for the next three days!
Aside from some tweaking of the text lines here and there in the JavaScript bowels that Google Gemini kicked out, I didn't do any coding at all. Although, by the time I was done, it felt every bit as exhausting as if I had. It had all the drama and creative flush associated with the process and rather revealed how much fun developing in general is for me even if not directly brickmaking the bricks.
There was endless AI prompting, copy/pasting, aforementioned text tweaking, debugging, and so on. And, to get this published in the Chrome Store I needed an entire support website and privacy policy. The website I actually did code - ages ago, being the "Battle Blog" engine. All I had to do was spin up an instance. But AI did everything else including writing me the privacy policy and answering all the technical questions that Google requires for Chrome Store submissions.
I submitted everything late Sunday night and on Tuesday morning, judging from my logs, after about maybe 30 minutes of reviewing my submission, Google approved and published it.
Incredible.
They say coders are going to be obsolete and I now have a better understanding of what that means. I am not sure I buy it entirely still, but, let's face it, I have this albeit rinky-tinky tool that I could easily be charging people for (but am not) with very little practice in JavaScript, let alone the machinations of Chrome's background processes that make my extension work. All just from making suggestions and providing crafty prompts to an AI engine.
The JavaScript I could re-hone myself in in a matter of a few months (I did work with it briefly for a maybe a year or two, then, on a very spotty basis afterwards), but understanding race conditions and browser timings and all the handles and elements that need to come together - forgeddaboutit.
I would have more sympathy for professional coders but can't help see it more pragmatically. After all, didn't coding in the real sense already die like at least a decade ago? What are frameworks and libraries if not just a more manual form of AI? A typical developer out of college doesn't go into a company writing the thing that generates a random number and make the screen go bleep. He uses a framework that he stitches to other things to make a final product. There's no real "coding" so much as there is all that "stitching". So, I'm of the view after this experience, that AI development is just a rung higher on the same ladder.
My original 1990s application was indeed called "Stepping Stone" but the iteration published to the Chrome Web Store is called Web Stepper. It seems that by today there are several software companies and entities out there using "Stepping Stone" and I wanted to avoid stepping on (legal?) toes.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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My Missing Eye
06/16/2025
It's been a handicap going day to day with a missing eye for months. At last, it turned up in the well of my dishwasher.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Still Improving Battle Blog in 2025
06/15/2025
Even a decade at least after developing the first iteration of Battle Blog I'm still improving it.
An astute reader, probably the reader, of Explaining Myself noticed that the "new post" notifications used an indirect link back to this website.
This broad link back was fine before I added a permanent-state "elastic" feature to Battle Blog, which is basically a Battle Blog setup mode that turns Battle Blog into more of a static website than a blog. I refer to this make up as "repository mode".
As a blog, the latest entry is always the top post, so the previous indirect method of calling subscribers attention to it was good enough. A publisher makes a post, an email goes out that includes a generic link back to the main landing page, and users spot the post when they do. Easy-peasy if not a bit programmatically lazy.
But when the platform is set to its repository mode, everyone lands back at the main page that never changes. So, there's confusion.
I am hoping that as of this post that I've modified the outgoing message to always include a link back to the actual entry so that no matter which mode it's in, subscribers will see the content they opted to be tipped off about, directly.
This is the first post going out with the fix, so, I may wind up tweaking it further if it doesn't work as planned.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Car Creeper Event of June 14, 2025
06/14/2025
This is another generic car creeper foiled by our locked car doors. We get these from time to time and I try to post the footage for maybe education purposes or to remind on the audaciousness of people.
The creeper tries our cars unsuccessfully before continuing up West Ferry where he then appears to try two others as he goes.
Cameras are all around but this person is unconcerned based on his underbelly read of local police resources and the unlikelihood of ever being confronted over what is little more than a trespass (up until they gain entry anyway).
One takeaway though: Masks in warm or hot weather at night or the early morning hours should be alarming enough to society that even if no crime is (yet) committed, such a person deserves a little extra watching. Make these people know that by simply putting on a mask they've already raised the alarm about them.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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This Might Not Have Ended Well
06/13/2025
The dashcam captured this unusual duck crossing during the waning commute hour on Main Street here in Buffalo this evening. I stopped and hit the hazards but man, was I worried the car in the lane right of me wouldn't do the same. Either someone would see'em and crush on through anyway, or, just wouldn't see'em in time.
But fears were for not. A car to my right did spot them and was empathetic enough to stop. Ducks made it across just fine. Whatever fine to them is anyway.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Dealing With Snakes at Work
06/10/2025
Encountered this creature while exiting work yesterday. We contained it before I left completely but word has it that another worker eventually bucketed it and took it back outside to the woods.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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