Explaining Myself.
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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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Noodling Over Blogging and the Original Blogging Platforms
05/31/2025
During blogging's heyday there were a lot of platforms that rose to make what was essentially just online publishing, easier. Really anything that could produce a web page could be used for blogging, but platforms designed for it included a workflow that directly supported quick article entry and instant ordering of presentation, among other mechanisms.
Examples of the mid-20s explicit blogging platforms were WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Livejournal.
I didn't prefer any of them at the time as I had evolved in web publishing using raw HTML, essentially Notepad, and an FTP client to update content to any given web host. I understood how easy it was to write in HTML not appreciating how daunting that was to average people.
Plus, to me, commercial blogging platforms were a sell out. It was obvious to me even then that producing content within someone else's framework gave those someones too much control. Not just over the content that one submitted but also over who might see it (or not). And, although it actually wasn't so horrible at first, they often included dropping ads around content which was a foreshadowing of today's internet enshitification.
And blogging platforms were to web publishing what AOL was to the early internet. They made web publishing too easy and people were quick to start blogs without paying attention to presentation or to any degree of customization. Blogs wound up looking all the same because by and large, people didn't put the extra effort into customizing or adding any "pizzaz" beyond the starting templates.
Truth be told in fact I didn't even like the concept of blogging let alone the platforms enabling it. Having a new word replacing the already perfectly good word of "publishing" allowed for the "containerization" of individual voices, a foil taken to a whole new level when people eventually left blogging en masse and actually and literally containerized themselves into MySpace or Facebook. A place where the magnificence of one's manifesto on the brilliance of communist ideology existed not as the full screen experience with all the open discoverability of a dozen impartial search engines drawing audiences right to it, but rather, just another string of text buried and blended with the insane screeds or mundane thoughts of a million others, just as The Man wants.
Again this was all to me at the time. I was a sneering digital snob.
Today I am surprised at my failure to recognize the bigger glory which was that such platforms were allowing more and more people to discover the publishing power of the World Wide Web at all. Today, I would recognize that better there should be a million poorly crafted and limping blogs than a world lacking the attention at all.
As with any mass population of "churn" exceptionalism is bound to rise. While many blogs were unimpressive and ill-tended over time, others rose from the background noise to become pretty big deals. The pure craft of blogging soon industrialized and from that, to this very day, it's almost impossible to research blogging as an expressive art because search results and the default mental orientation surrounding it all assume people are trying to do it for money. If you search for techniques on improving your blogging impact you're going to get a wall of hits that assume "impact" means "dollar making" and will counsel accordingly.
And, as I write this, AI is on the precipice of making human apes as the first stop for any creative or informative content obsolete. Future quests to improve blogging will boil down to the question of which AI products to use. An inevitable future that I prefer not to even think about.
One of those blogging platforms that people might have found themselves gravitating to was Blogger (now long owned by Google as BlogSpot). And within that still-active framework one can still in these 2020s find a few active gems of content that people are putting their energy into.
Check out Media Confidential for example. It's been doing its thing, clean and simply, since 2010. It is unapologetic about its web-favored blog form, correctly focusing on being consistent and interesting. It doesn't look horrible on a phone but it isn't pandering to mobile either. If you're reading it, it's because it's interesting stuff.
There are plenty of active blogs on this platform. Using this crafted Google search URL (a query that focuses on 2025 blogspot.com domain hits with only web results) you can immerse yourself. If you want to break free of the 2025 focus, just replace "2025" with a word reflecting something different and re-submit the query. You may not get active blogs but even the waltz through dead blogs may jar you into understanding what has been lost.
Spend an hour or two, preferably on a laptop or desktop computer, clicking around and getting that liberated feeling courtesy of the hold-outs. I hope it will inspire people to get back to personal web publishing (even if on a blogging platform) as much as I hope my own blog here does.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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