Blog

The first new feature in decades: Games. An array of 22 daily games to challenge logic, numbers, words, and other bits from the site. What good is daily games without leaderboards and tracking your progress. For the first time in decades, registration to the site is back. Registration keeps your stats and progress across any device. There are no subscriptions. As part of singing up, you can control the order of the games, and you can hide any you are not particularly fond of. Your account remembers your News category selections and weather location…

Just when I thought I had redone everything, I forgot site search. Each new component had it's own search, designed to be fast and efficient. Meanwhile, the top search function relied on Google's indexing (and ads). I knew it could be better. AI to the rescue…

Trying to find an acceptable solution is no longer a battle of available products. This weekend I was struggling to find an application that made weather easy to view. Easy, like, not so great vision... want to read it at a glance, no struggle, no glasses, high contrast. Every app failed. Spend some money, then they have options. Back in the day (2025), we'd suffer and adapt, that was not the outcome…

One of the longest held items on my wish list was to replace the Forum. It was a blog, a calendar, and the site's user identity. It was never used for what it was designed for. Why did this take so long? Availability of a light-weight, integrated solution that does everything I want it to, without significant overhead. It did not exist…

A modern replacement to the gallery, Piwigo, is live. AI assisted in fully integrating the look and authentication from day one. This had been on my "to do" list for years, but I did not have the time to implement. Go live took less than a day. Within a week, the minor bugs were killed…

Weather has had another overhaul, though less significant. Everything below the big graph can be moved. Positions are remembered per browser. A location header stays on top with the most important details. Have a large display? Up to 3 columns for viewing the data. A Hazards card added to show the most concerning weather conditions in one place…

As my comfort with AI grows, so do the projects I assign it. In the last week, AI has been adding features far faster than I ever had time to do in the past. The limitation is no longer my coding free time... it is now the ideas I have for enhancing the site. Every feature added required investigation and follow-ups before functioning as intended. I believe skill and know-how are required to validate that AI has not made a mistake. As AI often tells me: "You are right for saying that."…

AI models continue to improve. The latest models will try multiple options to find the best one. This ability has enhanced this site. I believe there are no measurable performance optimizations left here. It is time to add features. Today I added Air Quality graphs to the Weather page. Less than 2 hours from concept to production…

I do not consider AI to be Artificial Intelligence. It is a very clever algorithm, one that calculates advanced pattern matching results on massive data sets without much prompting. At quick glance, it feels like it is thinking. It is not, it is a Large Language Model (LLM). This does not mean it is not useful…

Dark mode support has been added. It follows your browser's setting. The support has been added across the site. With the implementation, more of the site aligns with a consistent theme. Most of the changes are in Links on mobile and the menus and buttons for the Forum and Gallery…