Author: Ross Wintle

This news story is a near-perfect Ross cross-over of:

– Grammar policing
– IT system ridiculousness
– Over-enthusiastic NIMBYism

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-68942321

Oh dear. How awfully (or wonderfully!) middle aged am I now.

I have a preferred toothpaste brand.

And I’m buying bird feeders and watching the birds in my garden.

😂

Nice to see Chris being productive. I like the “right tools for the job” message here!

Launching New Sites on Astro
https://chriswiegman.com/2024/05/launching-new-sites-on-astro/

Ooof. Shots fired on the weekly satirical news quiz show…

“I haven’t been to Rwanda, but I’ve been to Swindon. We should threaten to send asylum seekers there. That would put them off coming.”

How long have I been a professional programmer?

Over 25 years. That’s how long.

What was I doing today?

Debating the relative merits of the following:

if (title)

if (Boolean(title))

if (title !== undefined)

if ((typeof title) != null)

if (title ?? ‘’)

I’m not sure if this is because of my experience, or despite it! 😬

UK Politics

---

Holy Moly. Just over a year ago my council was Conservative controlled. Labour claimed it last year. There's now 41 Labour councillors and 15 Conservative!

This was a "Labour hold", but in reality the Tories have been truly demolished over the last two local elections.

TIL what the most dangerous animal (measured by how many people are killed by them) in the UK is.

VERY interesting!

Lol. Pop quiz for web dev nerds:

Why might you suddenly start seeing Stripe test card failures today?

Excellent video from @briancoords on #WordPress dot-com (!) Studio that clarifies what it is and debunks what it is not.

https://youtu.be/QEP3H17BkVI

Opens work Slack to check for alerts.

Not really any alerts. But oh my, someone let off a Slack bomb and I can see my whole morning draining away before my eyes.

People with publicly visible tattoos… how do you feel about people asking about them? Is it annoying? Or do you like it … is that the point?

Thinking that, at some point, when I have some more time. I'd like to revive my Beyond WP newsletter/blog.

In some ways it makes sense that the WordPress news is all about WordPress. But there's SO much going on elsewhere in tech that's cool and I think more WP developers should developers should be looking outside the WordPress ecosystem and there doesn’t seem to be anything that caters for this.

Have been playing my little Scrabble-like game with some play testers.

It’s a static, serverless, single-page app. And the absolute beauty of not having to log in is just brilliant.

I can click a game link in any browser on any computer and Just Play.

I want to make more stuff like this.

Backgammon next? That's gotta be super easy to encode.

Game: https://words.pico.games/

Write-up: https://rosswintle.uk/2024/04/static-not-scrabble/

Weekend hacking after @topher1kenobe pointed me at “Ottendorf Cyphers”.

I’ve heard about these, though I didn’t remember the name.

It’s a cypher/code where two people have the same book and the code is page/word/letter.

Topher tried to do this with web pages once. I made my own version with bookmarklets.

https://page-cypher.veryuseful.app/

(My original attempt at building something failed because CORS!!!! 😬)

I have discovered a new physical force.

It is a force of strong attraction.

And it seems to exist only between the toes of young children and solid objects at ground level.

Very curious. Physicists should investigate. There’s a PhD thesis in here somewhere!

I have to say, co-pilot is pretty dang good at giving me simple algorithms for game rules.

It’s written quite a lot of my static scrabble game for me. Simple loops with variations that, yes, I could write myself. But it already did the boring grunt work.

It wrote a better version of “maybeScoreVerticalWord” than I did!

Scrabble scoring logic is more complicated than I thought! 😅

Updated my serverless Scrabble clone this weekend to fix the scoring logic and make some other improvements.

Still not quite perfect. But better!!

Feel free to start a game with me (in DMs) or a friend.

https://words.pico.games/

Games are passed between the two players as URLs. Play. Grab the new URL. Send!