Over the last month I’ve done a lot of little updates. Now that the government is shutdown and I’m just hanging out at home, I figured I no longer had an excuse not to write them up.

If you let them build it, they will build it

I added the ability for users to submit presets to the Keyboard Layout Analyzer and the feature ended up being reasonably popular, with users creating and submitting lots of neat configurations. However, I was lazy in implementing the feature, and made it only partially automatic. Once a layout is submitted, I’m emailed the code I need to add to the config.htm file. This works out fine, since I only get about one or two submissions a week.

Since that feature worked out great, I decided to add a similar feature to the Text Color Fader, except instead of layouts, it was color presets… and oh did my laziness come back to bite me. It was originally setup to email me the code I needed to add after each submission, but after a week of getting 20-30 emails a day (and discovering that most submissions were just people testing out the submission feature), I realized I’d made a grave mistake. I went back and re-wrote it to include a proper admin panel and submission database. Now I just get a few emails a day and can easily approve/disapprove submissions. This approach definitely doesn’t scale, and with the number of presets growing daily, neither does the combobox I’m using on the front-end. However, I feel like I’ve bought myself time, and at the least there’s a neat color preset database that’s being compiled (users have submitted some very nice presets).

Ergodox Layout

When I originally overhauled the Keyboard Layout Analyzer, I put in support for different keyboard configurations – however, I never really showed this feature off. After getting a request to support the Ergodox layout, I knew I had an opportunity. I created a “key map” for it and uploaded it into the app. Within days users had submitted a number of nice alternative layouts for it, which was really cool to see.