Raymond is a senior developer evangelist for Adobe. He focuses on document services, JavaScript, and enterprise cat demos.

Latest Posts

Converting a Vue 2 App to Alpine.js

A little over two years ago I published an "idle clicker game" built in Vue.js. I called it "IdleFleet" and was heavily inspired by games like A Dark Room, where I relied on simple text graphics and game mechanics that would change as you played. In my last <Code><Br> session, I walked through the process of building a simple text game and brought up IdleFleet as an example. While playing the game to refresh my memory about what I actually built... I discovered I actually really liked it. I decided it would be good to give it some attention with new features and other updates, but before I could do that, I knew I needed to switch from Vue to Alpine.js.

Testing Multiple Variations of Generative AI Prompts

In nearly all of my recent explorations of Generative AI, I've come to realize how important prompts are. That hasn't necessarily translated me into writing better prompts all the time, but being aware of the problem is at least one step towards correcting it, right? One of the things that I thought would help me personally would be to have a tool to quickly compare and contrast different prompts. Obviously, I could just open up multiple tabs in a browser, but I really wanted something more direct and simplified for my purposes. With that in mind, let me share what I've built.

Links For You

Good morning programs. Before I get started with the three links I want to share with yall, some personal notes.

  • Tomorrow I'm giving a free online presentation at the Adobe ColdFusion Online Summit where I'll be talking about how to use Adobe Acrobat PDF Services with ColdFusion. Join me and see how easy the APIs are,or, join me and laugh at how bad my ColdFusion skills have gotten.
  • I had my second <Code><Br> episode last week and it went great (imo). I walked through building a simple to play web-based game based on Paper, Rocks, Scissors. You can watch the recording here: https://youtu.be/15SgRdJPdoE
  • I decided to give another ad network a try, ethicalads.io. I saw it on another site and loved how lightweight and simple they were. I'm not sure how well it will work, but if it offsets my only cost (the newsletter), then it's a win. As a reminder, I'm looking for sponsors for this blog, and if you or your company would like to do so, just reach out!

Adding a Guestbook to Your Jamstack Site (Yes, Seriously)

Don't do this. I'm serious. Or do it, I certainly don't listen to reason when it comes to building demos. I've been in web development for a very, very long time, and I've seen many trends come and go. Guestbooks were a way for folks to leave a comment on your site as a whole. I haven't seen one in ages, but some still linger. In fact, Ana Rodrigues has an absolutely lovely guestbook driven by Webmentions. And if you really want to, you can still download a Perl CGI guestbook over at Matt's Script Archive. I haven't written Perl in decades, but I absolutely loved it back in the 90s. That being said, I had a free hour yesterday, was bored, and decided, why not do something fun? The result - my new guestbook that you can visit today. Here's how you too can (but don't) add a guestbook to your Jamstack site. (My example is in Eleventy, but uses nothing specific to Eleventy.)

Google Gemini as Your Dungeon Master

So this is absolutely just another example of me playing around too much, but I had to share. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, Google's AI Studio now supports uploading files and working with them in your prompt. Today I decided to give the Chat interface a try as I hadn't yet played with it. On a whim, I googled for "dungeons and dragons rules PDF" and... well, you won't believe what happened next. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

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