For a couple years now, maxwelljoslyn.com has been sorely in need of a facelift and some new functionality for user-friendliness. Over the last few weeks I've finally gotten around to that, and if you're reading this, you're on the new version of the site.
The rest of this post is a showcase comparing what the site looked like before and after mid-September 2026, for the sake of future visitors (including me).
A Better Homepage
The homepage is a better experience for new and returning readers alike. "Greatest Hits" comes first, is updated for 2026, and is slimmed down to make room for a photo gallery! After that, we segue cleanly into new posts.
On his blog, Alexis Smolensk takes down the argument that using AI ruins your writing, by detailing just how magically useful it is for assisting with your writing -- so long as you bother to use it intelligently.
Last night's first overnight Slartibartfast run was a success. I marked 4 issues as acceptable for it to work on, and it produced a draft pull request for each.
Tonight I whipped up a quick status monitor as an admin page on this website, so I can peek at what it's doing.
The costs shown below are not what I'm actually paying. To my knowledge, there's no straightforward way to understand how many tokens you have access to within each 5-hour Claude subscription window. Slartibartfast maintains statistics on how much work it can perform in 5 hours, then estimates both that window size and the cost per worker process, so I (and it) can eyeball how much work it can do in the remaining time. The actual stats are measured in tokens, but since those are large numbers, everything's converted to an approximate dollar cost for the end user.
I've spent the last few nights rolling myself a "software factory", a system for using an unattended coding agent to autonomously pick and work on issues from my GitHub repositories.
The system's name is Slartibartfast, after the hapless designer of fjords in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For short, I call it "Bart".
The primary Bart process is a good old-fashioned program, not an AI. It runs on the same server that hosts my 3 live websites (Zingor; Unsphere; and this blog).
On startup, Bart builds a list of all open issues from my GitHub repositories which satisfy the following criteria:
If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first.
There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.
But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.
Ahhh, it's a good night to do some coding. I improved the performance of the market page in my D&D application, reducing overall page load time from 2 seconds to 0.8 seconds.
Players purchase items using a "Buy" form. The DM has additional controls in that form to "Give" a player character tradegoods directly. One of those <form> elements exists for each player-purchasable tradegood, and there are about 1,200 of those now. While profiling, I discovered that the 100ish <option> tags on each "Buy/Give" form (one for each potential buyer or recipient of the purchase) were bloating the page to a horrific 25 MB.
