This site has been updated with a couple of new things!

Words are cool and good

They let you write more compelling statements than that.

I track words that I think have an interesting background, sound weird, are new to me, or are otherwise noteworthy. At least, I've been trying to.

A few days ago, I added a page containing many words that I've found interesting throughout the last few years. I hope to have a comprehensive archive to replace the myriad text files, random notes on my phone (the closest I ever got to a definitive list was a single note blandly titled "words"), even sticky notes strewn throughout my belongings. This defeated the point of tracking them; I kept losing them!

I've been trying to collect every note I can and compile them into this list, but in a classic case of getting sidetracked by a "what if I had (x)?", I wanted a daily word. There's a pretty nifty and compact solution until the list turns into a dictionary. It uses the current date as the seed for a cyclic redundancy check, creates a deterministic "random" index from the seed, and modulos to "today's" word.

$today = date('Y-m-d');        
$hash = crc32($today);
$index = abs($hash) % count($valid_words);        
$daily_word = array_values($valid_words)[$index];

I wish all of my distractions were simple four-liners.

I don't know what makes a good theme

In the past, I heavily relied on frameworks to do the lifting for me. Visual design isn't my forte and my prior forays into CSS typically ended in an abomination. In the past three months, I've tried to at least learn. Best practices and knowing the line between form and function are something I still need more exposure to, but I think I've come a long way.

You can now try out my most recent experiments—— and I choose that word very deliberately—— in the header of this site.

• Standard light/dark: Definitely generic but required the least visual creativity, which is sometimes what you want from me. The heights of my visual creativity are typically through the forms of stick figure sketches.
• Charming & Ugly: If you want a bizarre, grating color palette inspired by custom blogs of yesteryear.
• H@x0r: You took the blue pill or need to hack into the mainframe.
• Bureaucrat's delight: Coffee break! A muted, boring theme so you can pretend you're at work. For some reason.

Expect some tweaks and fixes in the coming days.

What's to come

Actual posts, perhaps?