March 28: Well, I finally settled on using mistune as a Markdown processor. This won't be an acceptable permanent solution, but I'm so done struggling with this for now. I found two comments that were messed up and fixed them. Let me know if anything else is messed up (I'm sure something is). It also inspired me to write Has your favorite tool actually saved more time than it's costed?.

March 27: I feel bad about the total lack of new content in the last week, but I'm still grinding on this damn quest for a better markdown processor. It seems like a neverending toil of investment and disappointment. Anyway, I finally have a new article: Transgenderism in Fizzy's server.

March 21: New articles: Things we still can't do in CSS and The sins of quarantines.

March 20: New software article: How to make fragment links survive position:sticky.

March 16: I removed the timestamp from the navbar and put it in the comment-section. Comments made before the article was last modified now have orange timestamps. I hated doing this because it meant (shiver) dealing with Dates in Javascript, and I had to add a dependency to do it, but that navbar cramp had to be fixed.

I know the layout of the navbar is still imperfect (the top two elements look misaligned when logged in, but it's just because of the difference in width). I'll have to experiment a little more with squishing them into the center, and I also want to look into moving the homepage link to the center-top so it doesn't seem like it's being treated as part of the title.

Later this today: I did change the navbar some more, so the two top panes are aligned to the edges of the title. I think it's an improvement, but still not completely satisfactory. Also, I posted My names and the story of Evan.

March 15: I scrapped the article "Boilerplate rules". 231 made a really good comment on it back in January that I asked in response what I should do with the article, but since I never got a response I forgot about it. Of my three points, one was invalid, another was only half valid, and the other was basically summarizing another article I'd written. It didn't merit keeping the page around.

New articles: Objectivism in software and To add rights is to subtract rights.

March 14: New poem: Ode To Prismata.

March 13:

• I added the <meta> tags that give my pages a preview when you share them on social media sites! Only tested on Twitter, but it should work anywhere. I also changed my templating system to Jinja instead of my home-baked, kludgy system. It shouldn't visibly affect anything, but let me know if anything's broken.

• Textareas autoexpand now! Enjoy.

• New article: Against "enhanced" basic web components.

March 12: New article: Libertarian arguments for and against open borders. If it sounds very out-of-style for me, it's because I conceived it as a BHL post, but they still haven't responded to my other guest post request.

March 11: New articles: Platform designers: got common sense? and Problems with rating systems and how to fix them. I've noticed that I'm forming a topic with these two, the old one on reddit downvoting, and the one on tag systems, which only tangentially fits in argument/ and the tags one I put under software/. They should at least all be in the same category. I might have to move tags to argument/, but then I have to change its canonical URL and worry about the effect that might have on the dev.to crosspost.

March 10: The notifs panel will now show your current key fingerprint if you have a public key.

March 9: Improvements:

• The edit button no longer appears on comments you can't edit.
• Reply notif emails have a link to the new comment.
• On the notifs panel, you can see your claimed username if you have one.

March 8: Phew! What an evening.

So around 6 PM I downed the server working on big changes. I thought I'd only need to down it for a few minutes, but things got hairer than I expected, and it ended up down for hours as I desperately fiddled with Google, Django and Postgres. I plan to post the story of how this happened to dev.to tomorrow, but for the time being, here are the upates I've brought you:

• You can upload a PGP public key and any password reset emails will be encrypted.
• Once you've uploaded your key, you gain the ability to edit comments made with it, and to claim your username so no one else can post as it! Unfortunately for the time being it shows the edit button on all comments when you have a key, but I'll hopefully get around to fixing that in the next few days. I'll take manual action to link existing comments by registered folk to their accounts.
• I fixed a bug that made you still get notification emails about your own comments.
• I fixed a bug that made the notifs panel not refresh after a successful login if you viewed it while logged out.
• Mostly behind the scenes: admin powers aren't specifically tied to my username anymore; the User model has an admin flag. So other closely trusted people will be able to do previously me-only stuff like edit the Spem dictionary.

I won't be surprised if some of this is broken, but I feel pretty epic about today, especially since this was also a day I made more progress on RTTP than in the last week combined :)

March 6: I changed the navbar structure a bit so it's less cramped on mobile. There's probably still improvements to make, but this is less egregious on pages with really long titles.

March 4: New articles: Democracy is nihilism and The experience calculation problem. I went ahead and made the change: the miscellany category is a thing now.

March 3: I added the article Wearing many masks. It's not linked from any categories yet because I'm teetering on the decision of adding a "Misc" category. If I linked this from the root page, I'd have three image-card links that were just to a single article and had the logo as their image. I want to add a Misc category to put this contact info, and the logo explained under, but I'm not quite certain if I want to do that. Having the contact info be two clicks away from the root page is not an idea I'm attracted to...

I've also become sure that the site needs a more serious interface revamp, which might affect how I want to do this. The navbar is too cluttered on narrow viewports on a subcategory page. I'm pretty sure I want to keep the sticky navbar since it has the login status and the dark mode switch, and the timestamp is also important to be able to see while reading comments. One thing I'm thinking about is taking out the article title, and displaying it in an <h1> at the top of the article.

I don't like the way it would look, but that idea might have SEO benefits. Now that I'm using the <article> tag and crossposting, I've getting the impression that the article title shouldn't be outside of that element.

An obstacle is that if I used h1's for the article title, I probably couldn't use h1s in the body. I might have to use h2 as a max. That'd require reworking my software reviews. Maybe I could just use h2-h4 and have my stylesheet reduce the different in sizes, so an h4 is still bigger than normal text.

Another thing I've been thinking about is whether it would be a good idea to reduce the page width on fullsize screens and use the margin space for a recent comments panel. A lot of other sites show their recent comments panel on all pages. I'd been deterred from doing it here because of the category dissonance - someone might follow a link to a page in one category, and I might look like a link spammer if the first thing they see is comments on unrelated content. But it wouldn't be too difficult to make them scoped to just the category they're on.

Later today, I basically finished The Concise Python Tutorial part 4: Mutable types, but I haven't crossposted it to dev.to yet, as I think it could use some polishing/feedback. I also finally added a test case for the assignment in part 3, to make the intended behavior clearer.

March 2: New article: Punishment and reward are not alternatives.

March 1: New articles: Traditions of lying: Santa Claus and April Fools and I hate caching.

February 29: New articles: Kill software for great glory and Tag systems and the problem of variant tags, added PHP to Incomplete list of standards, formats, and technologies that should die, and a new (kinda?) poem: Henry The Hero.

I really wanted to write more poems. I have a few scraps I've been thinking about for longer than this one, but when I decided to work on it just flowed. I'm not sure about including the title in the page body like I did for the other two. It seems unnecessary when it's in the navbar, and especially awkward when it's also the first three words in the poem.

February 28: I've edited my Javascript review. I've gained a lot of knowledge since I first posted it, and I've added and removed a few points. Also added Change my mind: tests are overrated.

February 26: New article on software: Overempowering Javascript.

February 22: Some changes to Spem: yeli (on purpose) and vigi ('work' as in 'succeed') were merged into zɪl, fel renamed to wɪl, and yelu (on accident) and fugi (malfunction) merged into a new word bɪl. I also removed kɪtzu, since it seemed to mean ki ve.

February 21: Two new articles on software: Why I live as root and Stop trying to take the user's choice.

February 20: Added the load more button on recent comments. Enjoy, miki mi.

February 14: New article on storytelling (man, how long has it been?): The D&D alignment system is worthless.

February 10: Over the last couple days, I've revised most of my articles on storytelling. All of them dated back to when I was a nascent philosopher with ideas I cringe at now, as well as a much worse writer, and I think they're all in a presentable state now. I actually scrapped the articles on heroes, villains, and worldbuilding, because my whole framework for those ideas was wrong-headed, and I think I said next to nothing I still stand by in them. The only worthwhile stuff I said in the plot article is on its own now: Don't have POV characters lie to the audience.

I've also been revising my reviews. The early versions of a lot of them sounded more like a rant to remind myself why I hated the work than an earnest attempt to make the case for someone who wasn't already convinced.

February 7: Added comment previewing. Enjoy :)

February 6: I haven't posted in a long time, but today I bring some Spem updates. Added iv, eiv, tazi, and tafu, and renamed the combo verb tag to adverb.

January 31: I posted part 3 of The Concise Python Tutorial.

January 26: I added the second part of my Python tutorial and a rebuttal to Shane Killian on utilitarianism.

January 25: Fixed a slight bug where if you loaded the Spem search page with the c query param, like from a recent comments link, it would load the whole dictionary because it would see that you loaded it with some query params, but no filters.

I also posted the first part of my Python tutorial. There are an infinite number of them, I know, but I haven't seen a single one I like, and I really wanted to do it.

January 22: Tons of new words added to Spem! The word count is over 560 now :) New articles on software: Incomplete list of formats, standards, and technologies that should die and Why readability is important. I also added "rule of law" to Propaganda words and phrases.

January 21: I found out the most horrifying thing I learned about America in a long time. In happier news, updates to Spem: verɪθ -> yeθ, felɪθ -> weθ, vɑrɪθ -> yaθ, falɪθ -> waθ; all the should words have been added to the dictionary; a new question added on directness; and a tentative solution accepted to the age old conundrum of "without" I used to describe on the notes of u: due to the way Spem entities aggregate by default, "without" as different from "minus" is i nu. I also added a neat feature to the Spem dictionary: if you load it with a query string in the URL, it'll be automatically searched for.

January 19: I finally got around to editing my attempt at a complete formulation of the ethics of ownership with what I learned from the folks at r/DebateAnarchism. I haven't edited the article on capitalism yet.

January 16: Long-term improvement: the page URLs no longer have .html. Requesting the .html version should redirect to the new version.

January 14: I've changed my philosophy on simplicity in game design a bit after discussion with 231 in the comments. I've edited the articles on Depth and Simplicity.

January 13: New arguments: Oh my god, please stop writing dashes without spaces, Yujiri's First Law and Yujiri's Second Law.

January 12: New articles: The inherent logical problem with identity politics, The Cosmic Slot Machine actually works..., and my Nginx review. I really missed talking about software.

Later today, I fixed the navbar/URL title for the Software category. I originally called it "computing", because I wanted it to be more general than "programming" etc, but the right name didn't come to mind until the Jan 6 improvements.

January 9: One small but significant technical improvement: the section id links are less ugly now; they use the standard formula instead of a bare URL-safe encoding of the header text. The reason I didn't do this before was because I had some difficulty figuring out how to use Trent's Markdown library for this, so I put it off, but I wanted to get this out of the way before I gain much popularity.

January 8: Changes to Spem: kyu is dead and the relevant proposition has been accepted, resulting in the addition of an article on multiple predicates.

January 7: New rebuttal: First Round Capital is Sexist.

January 6: Category images added! I still have a few dissatisfactions with the change, but it looks so much fancier I couldn't wait to push it out.

January 4: More substantial updates to Spem, including the shortening of zɵrɪθ and selɪθ to zir and sel, the celebrable death of zɪtu, some improvements to tags, the official shortening of yen to en, and the death of zuni and the addition of the relevant question to the RFC page.

January 3: I've got one small general improvement for today: the recent comment links link to the particular comment, so it's easier to find what's new on pages that have a ton. Unfortunately due to the way fragment scrolling works and that the comments load after the page, this doesn't scroll all the way down to the comment, but to the comment section, and I don't have an obvious way to fix that. I imagine the change is still appreciated though.

There's also some pretty cool Spem updates: θe and θi have been added at long last after I finally got confident in my understanding of what they mean; several more open questions have been added to the list (ɪl ɑn ʌ ɪn kuto ŋe ki tiku ɪn tetɪk ne mi), and that's right - ŋel finally became ŋe :) Feels like shattering a sentimental antique. That word's been ŋel for ages. It was one of the first words I added to Spem, since "of" was one of the first English conflation demons I tried to tackle. That was way back in the days of Odyssey Of The Elements.

January 2: New articles: Hypocritical Objectivism and Socialism Is Not Greedy.

January 1: New article: The separation of legislation and enforcement is harmful.