For convenience, this is a slashpages mirror of my latest news page.
- A humans.txt file has been added to the site. For background, see https://humanstxt.org/.
Lots of new stuff this past month.
- The front page "hero" (that featured post section) background images are now capable of javascript interactivity... you may occasionally notice one of them moving, or reacting to your mouse movements. Right now I just only added this for a couple of my web demos that are listed on there.
- Performance, performance, performance! I have vastly improved the site performance by hacking away at redundant slow-motion database calls under the hood. From Pingdom's local SF server, my best recorded time so far has been the 4500-element front page loading in 2.2 seconds, and I'm regularly seeing it come in under 3.5 seconds, check it out: https://tools.pingdom.com/#6644658e2cc00000
- Speaking of which, my demo version of the most user-hostile homepage ever, which is one of the new Hero section animated backgrounds, no longer requires jQuery and is now plain javascript, removing one dependency from needing to be loaded. Just as annoying, though.
- The new IT Grimoire section continues to grow at an unreasonable rate. I keep my IT reference notes and troubleshooting logs there. Maybe useful to other people, maybe not.
- I haven't written this up or publicly announced it, but my new Big Diffr tool, a tool to catch LLMs in the act of destroying your code while they claim to be helping you troubleshoot, is online at https://michaelkupietz.com/demos/big-diffr/ . It's definitely still a work-in-progress, but it's usable.
- Also lookit my new CSS Point Light Source & Parallax Shadows web demo. Also features my neat pure CSS August Sun, not yet documented on this site but available in CodePen, as the light source. Fun!
- Pursuant to those things, I've started moving tools and demos you can actually play with to a new Demo & Live Tool Playground section in the Code & Algorithms section.
- On a personal note, this month I arrived back in San Francisco after a few months visiting family back east. That and more is documented on the new /Now slashpage, but you don't want to read that, seriously, it's really depressing.
- I have written my 1,000th mini movie review! For the record, my 1,000th review was for "Hosticide", a subpar-to-middling British thriller about the day-to-day life of a typical middle-class psychopath.
I've updated the Privacy Policy. I used to have a jokey one in there for some reason. Now it's a real one.
Also the Draggable Elements WordPress Plugin now works well on mobile. Or, at least, mobile Safari.
And I've added a few more 88x31 Website Buttons.
Along the left edge of the screen you'll notice a new "eyeball" tab. Check it out, it's fun.
Also I moved some of the 88x31 web share buttons to their own page at 88x31 Website Buttons.
The Draggable Elements WordPress Plugin demo has gotten a lot of rough edges sanded off and is working well.
I have also added an AI Policy page, mirrored for convenience at the /AI slashpage.
I've added a Petit Art gallery of Web Assets, including 88x31 buttons for this site and some other stuff.
The "Hire Mike" floater at lower right, and the Command Line Interface and Display Adjustments tabs on the left side of the screen, are now draggable, so you can move them around if they're blocking page text. Go ahead, play with it, and see a more complete demo (and eventually a technical overview, although it's not written yet) of the new plugin I wrote to accomplish this on the Draggable Elements WordPress Plugin demo page.
I've added a fun new section to the The Encyclopedia Of AI Apologies, showing examples of AI swearing at me and threatening to commit electronic suicide.
There's now a /Tests page, one place with a bunch of different scripts and technologies so I can monitor a single page for numerous kinds of failures. Not such a big deal for you as the reader, but a very big deal for me, and should mean less unplanned surprises as you wander around the site.
BTW Some image galleries that pulled from Flickr (not that you'd know the difference) weren't working recently. Fixed now.
Part of what I'm still working out with this site is how much to use it for updates/blogging/social media type uses. It really was intended originally just to be a static showcase for my art, but it's become a bigger part of my online identity, and will probably eventually transition at least partly to something more like a blog. .
As a stopgap measure, I've created this news page as a place to put more timely, current information, when I need to. Nothing now, but this is where it'll be when there is.
For convenience, this page will be mirrored under my slashpages as /latest.
Other pages showing timely site info:
Recent Site Updates - all recent edits to the site
Newest Articles - most recently created articles
/Devlog - developer log, technical notes so I an figure out what I was doing when something went wrong
