Inventory

Lately I’ve felt as though I’m spread quite thin. My default response to anything negative is to burden myself with an additional project, so a new blog seemed like an obvious choice. On further thought, having a single point of outward communication felt like a good way to condense and unify my ideas, and the feedback from friends, kind strangers, random hecklers, and so on.

I think a good first step in this newest endeavor is to take inventory of all of my projects and lay them all out for overview. This is most easily done by copying and pasting my list of domains from HostGator:

All The Tacos

Last year I embarked on a quest to eat one of every taco in the Fort Worth area. There’s a small amount of overhead associated with uploading pictures of the tacos and my logbook to Tumblr to power the site, but it’s small enough that I don’t mind it.

Staple Day

This is also a Tumblr site I set up as a catalog of the idea of ‘Staple Day’. It stems from a random observation I once had: you can see the staples in the middle of a pocket notebook. Why not celebrate being halfway done? What started as a joke became the trendy thing to do over in the Field Nuts group.

vegancravingfor.com

Nothing there yet. The idea for this site is to be able to append whatever you’re  craving after the domain name and get some approximation of the vegan version of that food. BBQ pulled pork? Here’s info about jackfruit. Egg salad sandwich? Got it.

The trouble is, I’m not vegan and don’t have serious plans to become vegan in the short term. I think this might be a great idea in the long term, but right now I don’t have the motivation to act on it.

The Griddle

The Griddle is my oldest and favoritest website. I started it in my senior year of highschool, all the way back in 2006, as a place to showcase my burgeoning web development skill and the myriad of puzzles I was writing for classmates. More than a decade later, I’m still posting as often as my free time allows me and have made a substantial side-hustle as a member of the puzzle community.

quesadillahunt.com

Another empty page. I had a shower thought that a peacock’s plumage is roughly the same shape as a quesadilla. Visions of pixel art peacocks collecting tortillas and cheese danced in my head for a solid ten minutes, which was just long enough for me to buy the domain before losing interest.

Sencha Confessions

This is another Tumblr site. I threw it together in a fit of rage toward Sencha’s ExtJS platform, which we use extensively at my day job. The platform did substantially improve, but there are still moments when delving through new features and examining the code that I wish I had liquor available to me at work.

isfishmeat.com

Currently blank, possibly easy to build, but more a rant than anything. I grew up half Catholic and half Methodist, and as I got older, I started thinking for myself. The topic that really never made sense to me was why it was alright to eat fish on Fridays during Lent. Fish is totally meat, and there are plenty of ways to get protein without resorting to fish as an exception. Backing up from that, why only give up meat on Fridays? Have Catholics become so out of touch with real spirituality that the idea of fasting has turned into a lazy superstition?

I Am Awesome

A catch-all for random bits of content that don’t belong anywhere else. I’m okay with it where it is and with what it has. The only thing that sucks is whomever had it before did some shady nonsense, and as a result the site is blocked from being linked on a few services.

Secret Special

You’re on it.

animportantannouncement.com

It seemed like a good domain at the time. It’s currently sitting unused.

therandomgame.org

This domain was originally used for a forum-based reincarnation of the Heckler’s Online message board from AOL back in the day. It’s where I met my sister from another mister, Emily, and her husband Aaron, and where I cut my teeth on internet humor. After a long time of it being dead, I randomly looked it up and saw it empty and decided I wanted to buy it. It’s currently unused but I like keeping it around for sentimental value.

Perplexible

This is a blog I started for ‘homeless’ puzzlers in search of an audience. It seemed like a good idea at the time; LiveJournal was getting sketchy, another blogging service was shutting down, and a few folks were concerned about finding a more permanent home for their craft. I did a quick WordPress install, added a theme, and got it underway… only to find that nobody was really interested. Over the years I had a few puzzlers in residence as well as guest posters, but it’s pretty barren.

I still use it for a few puzzling-related endeavors: firstly, it’s a good testing ground for The Griddle’s solve/fave API. Secondly, I hope to use it as the namespace for some extensions to the IPUZ spec for puzzle kinds that are not yet defined by it. The former is an actual use case; the latter is a pipe dream waiting on all the extra free time I dream of having.

Dave’s Mapper

Dave’s Mapper is the biggest project I’ve ever tried. It started as an extension of a simple one-page ‘Morph Mapper’ by Rob Lang and spiraled into my first legitimate web application: a map generator that uses hand-drawn tiles from a variety of artists.

The weirdest part of it is that I am not a role-player by any means, but a bunch of D&D and online role-playing communities have found and enjoyed using the app. It has lead to numerous online friendships and some freelance opportunities, but more importantly has served as a portfolio piece. I am currently updating it to work better on mobile devices and be more useful offline. The world around Progressive Web App techniques is evolving and maturing day by day.

Interst8

This one is in live alpha. Actually, alpha isn’t even low enough to describe it. I think I was on vacation, had an idea, and threw some code out there since I didn’t have my laptop available to set up a proper test environment.

What it’s going to be is a word puzzle game called Interst8 with a road-trip/highway theme. Me being me and thinking too far ahead, I got caught up thinking about how to manage input on mobile devices, so there’s the beginning bits of a custom keyboard/input interface out there right now. It’s inspired by the special keys in Textastic with a bit of road signage style.

Dave Goes The Distance

My portfolio and sticker store. Basically the highlights of this list plus some projects that I wanted to share. The sticker thing seemed like a great idea, but sales dwindled. I’m torn on whether to drop prices and sunset the thing or keep going and add new designs.

Oinker of the Sea

I had an idea for a fake food product called ‘Cramb’: ‘The luxury of crab and the great taste of ham, together at last!’ This might end up being a fake brand that I work into stickers, shirts, and other merchandise, but it’s hard to tell if that graphic design stuff is really where my heart is.

Junk in the Trunk

So, domain list complete, you can see that I have a lot of junk. This doesn’t even include offline misadventures like tending to my small herb garden, rinsing and bagging my recycling from work, taking care of my cats, losing weight, dating, and so on. Maybe a bunch of this stems from my late teens and early twenties when I was still energetic and idealistic.

I think my having to write descriptions for each of the domains and projects has been a good first step toward deciding whether they contribute to my joy or whether they’re an idea I need to let go. I’m open to feedback, and the hoarder in me hopes maybe a kindred nerd out there will read this and be interested in collaborating so none of these projects have to die. But deep down I know my number one problem is giving up control of things, and maybe the next step in fighting that demon is to let some domains expire, and to be at peace with an idea being put to rest.