I used to use Twitter (now X) as the place where I’d dump random thoughts, random articles, random rants, basically the short stuff. After Emperor Musk took charge, I moved most of that to Bluesky, but in reality my posting on either platform has dropped considerably. I’m much more interested in posting here and making this blog the one-stop shop for Mike Isherwood. My thoughts, my ideas, my ramblings, just me being random.
So I decided I wanted to move away from Twitter and Bluesky completely and host my short posts, or brain farts as I’m now calling them, right here on this blog.
My requirements were fairly simple:
I wanted to be able to post brain farts that could include links, images and tags. I wanted the latest brain farts to appear on the homepage, with a link to an archive of all the others. And I wanted each brain fart displayed like a post-it note. The archive would show them all on a scrollable corkboard, filterable by date and tag. Easy… in theory.
Creating the brain farts was harder than I expected. I knew there’d be a lot of CSS tinkering, but I didn’t anticipate how much. I also didn’t realise how anal I am about alignment and design in general. Thankfully, ChatGPT was patient with me while I complained that the post-its didn’t perfectly align.
After a couple of days of fiddling, I finally have the Brain Farts short posts looking pretty good, if I say so myself. (See below.)
I could’ve stopped there, but that isn’t the geek way. Obviously I now needed an app to post my brain farts. Nothing fancy, just something to post text, images, links and tags. Building the app was actually the easiest part of this whole project thanks to Replit.com
With one simple prompt and $15, Replit’s AI Agent built the app. There was some input from me in terms of direction and information (passwords), but that was it. Easy. Quick. Geek nirvana. (Here’s my affiliate link for Replit.com, I highly recommend it for any geek.)
So what’s next for Brain Farts? A “Send to Brain Farts” shortcut is already in the works. With it, I’ll be able to send a website link straight from my browser, add some text, and post a brain fart instantly.
For now, though, I’m happy. I’ve achieved what I set out to do, anything else is just a plus.
Read my Brain Farts here.
Take care,
Mike
Who Wrote This?
Note: 80% me, 20% AI. Mostly me, but I couldn’t have done it this quickly without the assistance of AI (ChatGPT & Replit.com). They supercharge my geekiness.