This week’s distraction: building a Wordle clone. No particular reason for doing this other than I felt like building one, although I did miss the small time waster of the original Wordle, and watching a game show with my parents that had a similar concept just made those feelings stronger. Main difference between this and Wordle classic: board randomly selects between 4-letter, 5-letter, and 6-letter words; no daily limit or social-media sharing when you guessed the word correctly; and the biggest one: UK English spelling.
Some remarks on how this was built: I used 11ty to build the static site. It originally started as just a HTML page with some JavaScript, but I wanted to leave the option open for bundling and minifying the JS with Stimulus. The dictionary I got from Hunspell, which is apparently the spell checker Apple has based their work on. There is a little bit of Go to filter and sort the dictionary of words. The words are in sorted order for the binary search algorithm to check if a word exists or not. The puzzle order is predetermined and was done by “shuffling” the indices in a separate array. Base styles are, of course, from simple.css.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here. Just be aware that it may not be as polished as much of the other stuff you find out there. Turns out that I can tolerate a fair few shortcomings in things that I build for my own amusement.
“Get out more” goal for January achieved. ✅
Just a small one this month though, as I was a little unorganised: just work drinks and coffee with a team I don’t usually work with. Baby steps I suppose.
Discovered new street art this morning. Took a photo of my favourites.
Was talking with a coworker at lunch today about his Twich streaming setup, and how he was using Unreal to produce backgrounds that’ll be composited with his webcam feed. He was clearly excited about it all. Streaming’s not my thing, but it was great talking with someone so enthusiastic about doing something like this.
It’s so strange how Hugo doesn’t configure Goldmark with unsafe enabled by default. Having it off makes sense for the Goldmark library, but the whole point of Hugo is to make a website. And websites, generally, contain HTML. You can turn it on, but it’s always a bit of a hassle.
How do I get an email about a support ticket, saying that they’re waiting for me to respond, without providing me a link or instructions I can follow to actually respond? Not even a link to the support page. Hmm.
The conspiratorial side of me is thinking that running shoes are getting more expensive and lasting half as long. The shoes I had have worn out considerably so I bought a new pair, which arrived today. So I’m officially marking the date.
