October 2025 Work Log (Patreon)

Hi again! Here's everything I worked on during the month of October, exclusively for patrons.

Link Cleaner

The updated Link Cleaner home page went live in October! This is the culmination of all the recent design upgrades, with better usability across all screen sizes and a more familiar look and feel.

When you go to the home page, you now see the URL bar roughly in the center of the screen, with the navigation bar on top and the header text explaining the basic functionality. You can see the before and after in the below images.

The detailed features list, donation links, and other text peeks through at the bottom of the screen. It's still there if you scroll down, but now the default view is more focused, closely resembling the default home pages for Google Search or ChatGPT. For someone finding Link Cleaner for the first time, it's now immediately clear where you put the link you want to clean.

The URL text field on the home page might look the same, but it has been rebuilt to change in size as needed. It can now expand to up to three lines of text, so larger URLs aren't cut off as often. On smaller screens, the paste and clear buttons are now below the text input. The clear button still only appears on devices without a keyboard connected, but that limitation might be removed in the future.

It took a surprising amount of work (and CSS flexbox code) to make the URL text field work well across all screen sizes and keyboard modes, but I'm pretty happy with the result. The same shortcut/bookmarklet and keyboard accessibility features are still available, too.

The Bulk Mode and Settings pages also received minor design tweaks to match the new color scheme. There are more functional improvements I have in mind for Link Cleaner, but I'm not anticipating any more design work for a while.

Spacebar

I published two articles on Spacebar in October:

Excel's AI: 20% of the time, it works every time

I made a website with Apple iWeb in 2025

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