Weeknotes - Oct. 10, 2025

Stuff That Happened

• This might be two weeks worth of notes since I didn't do one for at least a week and can't remember the breakpoint.

• Been playing around with the templates for my site a little to make it easier to control the outputs for headers.

  I had been using a generic -- title like:

  -- list
  -- title: Some Title Goes Here

  But, I kept going back and forth of it the title should be an h2 or an h3. So, I'm doing this explicilty now. For example:

  -- list
  -- h2: Stuff That Happened

  Much easier to deal with.

• I made a bunch of progress on bitty over the past couple weeks. I've started doing release candidates for version 1.x.

  I've done a few tweaks and am currently at v1.3.0-rc1. I'm really linking using it. The more I play with it the more I dig it.

• Part of the bitty move is a rename of the tag. It was <bitty-js> but dealing with version updates with the single tag sucked. I've gone to <bitty-1-3> where the 1 is the major version and 3 is the minor. That'll let me patch updates without having to change the tag names while allowing multiple major/minor combinations to exist on the same page/site.

  I plan on doing that numbering with all my components going forward. Probably a good blog post in there too.

• Specific things I added to bitty this week are .fetchJson() and .useTemplate(). Both are little quality of life improvements to cover things I do in almost every project.

  The project is at 215 lines of code with the minified version weighing in at 3,164 bytes.

  It was under 2K at one point. I'm not worried about the size increase. It's still tiny. Especailly compared to multie MB libraries and frameworks.

• Wrote a few blog posts. A bunch of time went into AI's Inevitable Photographic Journey. (which may or may not be done by the time you read this.) It's helped me clarify a little of my thinking about where I think AI is going.

• I'm doing Weird Web October. A challenge thing where you make one site a day based off a theme. I think most folks are making a page a day on a single site (which makes total sense), but I'm going all out and doing a subdomain for each.

  The overview page is at wwo-2025-0.alanwsmith.com.

  Making the sites has been a really good way to kick the tires on bitty. Helped me sand down some rough edges.

• Also made updates to simple site builder. I'm using version numbering for it's binary too. Makes it a lot easier to make upgrades since if I go back and work on a site that was built with an earlier version I don't have to worry about dealing with changes.

  So, yeah, big theme this week: Version Number All The Things.

• Oh head, I did alice.alanwsmith.com a week or two ago. Can't remember if I mentioned that yet. It's an experiment where each letter of the alphabet gets its own style and they change shape and color over time.
• Made commands.alanwsmith.com to for my CLI tools. Part of that was making status, commit, and push commands for git where the commit and push handle multiple steps automatically. Surprisingly large quality of life improvement from a minor thing.
• And, the last thing for the week was making: html-sizes.alanwsmith.com so I don't have to keep digging through the very spread out MDN docs every time I try to figure out the size of an HTML element.
• On yeah, I used AI for the first time to code: My First Time Using AI for Coding.