web development | In Search of Secrets

Tag Archives: web development

November 12, 2025 · 8:19 am

New Website, pt. I

You may have noticed that my website is crap.

The front page of insearchofsecrets.com as of 2025-11-08, looking like it came straight out of the aughts, which it did. — Look on my laziness, ye Mighty, and despair!

“Pilcrow” was the default WordPress theme waaaay back in 2011 when I started this blog, and it shows. The “featured images” I set on each entry so that they cross-post to Instagram properly are distracting, the layout is cluttered, the URLs poorly organized, and the styling is so badly designed it may as well be broken. So what’s a poor web programmer to do?

Why, ~~put off fixing it indefinitely~~ rebuild everything from scratch, of course!

I’ve been wanting to beef up my frontend skills for a while now (especially the fundamentals, HTML and CSS), and since I’ve finally realized that I can keep a devlog of my progress to avoid falling behind on my blog (duh), I have no more excuses to put it off!

I’ve decided to use the Kelp framework for the UI, for many reasons. I’ll go a bit more in-depth on what Kelp is, how it works, and why I like it in a future post, but I’ll say that one reason I chose it is because it has an HTML- and CSS-first design, which as I mentioned are skills I’d like to focus on.

(Another reason is that it’s being developed by one of my favorite bloggers, Chris Ferdinandi–I’ve mentioned him before!)

So far all I’ve built is a flirtier version of “Hello, World!“, but expect more updates soon!

A preview of my new website, which currently consists solely of the text "👋 Hi there, gorgeous!"

Amber Smalltalk

How come nobody told me about this before? Amber Smalltalk is a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language, which is what caught my attention. I have been a fan of Smalltalk for years, but the image-based development environment proved a little too cumbersome and monolithic for my tastes. Amber to the rescue!

Amber is a Smalltalk language for web development. Now, as I understand it, there is already an excellent Smalltalk-based environment for web development called Seaside. However, what sets Amber apart from other Smalltalk variants for the web is that it is client-based, and compiles directly to JavaScript. This means, among other things, that you can go try Amber out right now using nothing but your browser! It’s the perfect “gateway drug” for the wider Smalltalk world! I find this especially appealing because it means I won’t have to learn JavaScript to do portable, client-based web programming! Hurray!

After my initial “project” (modifying the “counter” example to count only by primes), I’ve started working on a web-based game. It won’t be the much-anticipated port of my game “Press A to Win” (my apologies to both of you who were hoping it would be), instead it will be a game about numbers! A game about finding numbers’ unique prime factorizations, specifically. What? Why are you looking at me like that? Of course it’ll be fun!

Anyway, you should go check Amber out. It’s great. I’ll have something more for you to look at next week. Until then, stay curious!