Experiments in Vibecoding on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Introducing Jellyboard: A Collaborative Sticky-Note Board for Workshops

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Google retired Jamboard, a lot of facilitators lost the tool they’d been quietly relying on. It wasn’t fancy. It just worked in a room full of phones, laptops, and a projector, with people who had no interest in making yet another account.

I’ve been building Jellyboard to fill that gap (well. Claude Code has been building Jellyboard…). It’s a browser-based sticky-note board for workshops, meetings, and brainstorming sessions. No installs, no ads or tracking, and no accounts for participants. Display a QR code, share a short join code, or paste a link into email etc., and people are in.

prototyping interactive online content with claude design

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:57:04 -0600

After creating a simple “design system” using UCalgary’s Brand resources, I uploaded a blog post, 2 ppt files, and a word doc with some links to Claude’s new “Claude Design” tool, and prompted:

I want to build an interactive online module (as a web page “learning object”) about Digital Transformation based on these files. The module will be self-directed, guiding people through an introduction to Digital Transformation and helping them to identify ways to approach it in their work.

Experimental Obsidian 3D Graph Renderer

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:05:56 -0600

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for visualizing the notes and connections in my Obsidian vault, and how to go beyond just producing pretty pictures and into something that might be useful to make sense of the whole thing. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s getting close. Vibecoding this with Claude Code has let me take some ideas I’ve had for years, and actually building a thing in a couple of hours.

How I built the Typeset custom theme for this website

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:45:00 +0000

I’ve been running this site on Hugo for several years now, and for most of that time I used other people’s themes and tweaked things around the edges. A few months ago, I decided to build my own theme from scratch with Claude Code. The theme is called Typeset.

Why build a custom theme?

The short answer: I got tired of fighting someone else’s decisions. Every borrowed theme comes with assumptions about what a blog is and what it should look like. Eventually those assumptions start getting in the way.

Prototyping a new kind of online course community platform

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:41:40 -0700

On the plus side, your humble protagonist has finally figured out how to break out of “the only thing he blogs about is how he uses Obsidian.” Unfortunately, it’s because I appear to be firmly in the middle of a bout of “the only thing he blogs about is how he vibecodes some half-baked idea into a usable thing.”

A blog post in 2 parts:

The Course Community Application
The part about vibecoding and using frontier genAI tools despite everything

The Course Community Application

After my experiment last week in building a local-LLM “course coach” application that students could use to engage with their course materials, a few things happened:

Prototyping a Brightspace Course Coach Application

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:42:55 -0700

Last night while watching the Olympics highlights, I was playing around with Claude Code to see if I could implement something I’ve been thinking of for quite awhile. What if students had an application that connected to the LMS (Brightspace in our case) and pulled all course materials, info, calendar, assignments, discussions etc. into a local database, and what if a local chatbot was able to interact with that database to guide a student as they learn? A socratic agent, coaching them without giving them answers. Prompting them as they engage with the course.

Experimenting with RSS Reader Interfaces

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:33:12 -0700

I’ve been using RSS readers for over 20 years. Most of that time has been spent using the excellent NetNewsWire application, but I’ve used others (including Google Reader, Fever˚, etc.).

After reading Terry Godier’s post on RSS readers being stuck in the email metaphor, I wanted to experiment with some ideas for a “non-email” metaphor for a feed reader interface. The most interesting and useful version of this that I’ve used was the “Hot” view from Shaun Inman’s Fever˚ application. What would it look like to integrate something like that into my NetNewsWire database?

on building an Obsidian Related Notes plugin using Google's Antigravity IDE

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:13:36 -0700

TL;DR:

I built an AI/LLM-powered “related notes” plugin for Obsidian. It seems to work, but who knows? There’s a video tour, and the code is in a GitHub repository.

I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years now, and have always wanted a good “Related Notes” plugin to help me find things that overlap with what I’m working on - based on the content itself, not metadata or links. Haven’t had any luck so I kind of gave up.

Building a standalone bookmarks web application

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:37:20 -0700

TL;DR

I used Claude Code to build a standalone web thing to manage bookmarks.

It’s at https://darcynorman.net/bookmarks/

I’ve also shared the code in case it’s useful to anyone. It’s AI Slop, with no warranty or support or whatever.

It’s at https://github.com/dlnorman/standalone-bookmarks

Back in the olden days, I was a pretty heavy user of the del.icio.us web bookmarking service¹. Then, it was acquired by Yahoo! and sold, then relaunched, then mothballed, then who knows? It’s been offline for awhile. I stopped using it somewhere in the Yahoo! era - I didn’t feel like feeding Yahoo!² so in 2013 I started using an open source bookmarking application called SemanticScuttle.

Building a standalone RSS-to-Mastodon bridge

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:21:52 -0600

I’ve been working to minimize hosting requirements and to reduce external dependencies for my website. I now have simple, lightweight, self-hosted search and commenting functionality. The only external dependency remaining was the way new posts were cross-published to Mastodon.

I’d been using the excellent Mastofeed service. Mastofeed works great! If you’re looking for a hosted (free!) solution, definitely check it out. You authorize it to post items to a Mastodon account, and it automatically toots whenever you publish something on a website by checking the RSS feed for new items. Easy peasy. But it’s an external dependency - it could disappear, or change, or start inserting ads or something, or who knows?

Building my own custom standalone comments app

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:23:14 -0600

Surely, one day, eventually, I will write a blog post that isn’t about vibecoding some bauble into existence and actually get back to something deeper. I think learning how vibecoding (and coaxing some form of LLM to do stuff in general) is an important thing to understand, not just read about. I’m absolutely not an AI Evangelist, but this work has changed my perception of LLMs and agentic tools as they (rapidly, so rapidly) increase in capacity. This is not that day.

Building a custom SQLite search engine for my Hugo site

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 12:56:36 -0600

Cogdog Shoutout

Following Levine’s Law: Start with the demo!

This post talks about how the new custom search engine for my website was built (original announcement from almost a week ago). The search tool is at https://darcynorman.net/search and the source code is available on Github if you want to check it out before/while/after you read this…

building a new search engine for my hugo site

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:55:21 -0600

One of my backburner projects for the last few years has been building a better search engine for my Hugo-powered site. It needed to be able to integrate with Hugo, and to run on a commodity webserver (so no NodeJS nonsense etc.)

The previous .json index strategy wasn’t sustainable - a .json search index was generated every time my site was built (yay!) and it got downloaded in the browser when someone wanted to search the site. Which worked, but slowly got unwieldy. The .json index is now over 7MB in size - and that downloads before you can search, with the javascript search taking place inside your browser. I needed a better solution before this just failed outright due to the size of the index.

AI-coding a decent asteroids game

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:27:13 -0600

I’ve been using Claude a lot for almost a year, but had never gotten around to trying the Claude Code version that integrates with Terminal to directly edit files. That sounds scary, and I’d been having luck with just copying/pasting stuff out of Regular Claude via the web interface. Anyway. I decided to try it out.

Anthropic’s instructions say to just run:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

to get started. macOS doesn’t ship with npm, but brew.sh can install npm and all of the Node.js nonsense that’s involved. So, I got to run this first:

bot traffic

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 11 May 2025 15:59:40 +0000

I don’t look at the webserver logs for this webthing in detail, but have been curious given the spikes in bot traffic over the last several months. Much of it is the traditional “I’ll just crawl your entire website multiple times per day to feed my search index”, but there’s been a LOT of “I’ll just crawl your entire website multiple times per day to feed my LLM training dataset, and I will ignore rate limiting that you’ve set in robots.txt”