About

I think I've said everything worth saying, and more, on the home page and in the articles and unstrung pages. Below is a brief note regarding the name, "eyesunstrung," and the domain, ".vip." And there are some notes for the techies.

Why the Name?

At a high level, think of guitar strings as transmitting a signal from your fingers (or pick) to the body of the guitar to generate sound. If there are no strings, there is no sound. Likewise, optic nerves transfer signals from your eyes to your brain, resulting in sight. Without functioning optic nerves, nothing gets from your eyes to your brain, thus blindness. If your optic nerves don't work, your eyes are unstrung.

Why the VIP Domain?

Yes, we are all certainly very important people these days. But this VIP is for the Visually Impaired People. There is (hopefully, was, by now) some silly controversy around that term. So be it.

Into the Technical Details

eyesunstrung.vip is hosted on GitHub Pages using a custom URL. The URL is from Namecheap, a mostly accessible, if not very usable, registrar. I could link GitHub's and Namecheap's setup guides, but these days I'd ask Claude how to set it up. Claude will either give you step-by-step instructions, offer to do it for you, or point you to the latest guides.

eyesunstrung.vip is developed using Eleventy, a static site generation tool. The first iteration of eyesunstrung.vip (July 2024) was developed manually, by me, using Sphinx and the PyData Sphinx Theme. That version exists only in GitHub history. I opted to switch to Eleventy once I fully accepted LLM coding. I figured if Claude is writing everything, my like/dislike of JavaScript doesn't matter. So there we go.

Same goes for the unstrung app: it's entirely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all written by Claude. I actually like HTML and CSS though. And JavaScript does enable some useful functionality. Unfortunately it also enables so much inaccessible and unusable garbage online. If you want to write accessible web-based apps, tell Claude to use JavaScript only when absolutely necessary. And tell Claude absolutely no frameworks, especially not React (Electron is a platform, not a framework). Always favor standard HTML elements; they're far more likely to be accessible out of the box.

Enough Already with Claude

Yes, I am using Claude to develop this site and the unstrung app. I often use "Claude" to mean AI coding tools in general. Some people have strong opinions about disclosing the use of AI. Now you know, if you care.