web analytics

My robot pal

I had a recalcitrant problem with the web page I’m trying to make – on first load, it showed a 404 File Not Found error. Worked fine when you started clicking links, but it loaded ugly.

If you can’t read the text:

Niceee glad that fixed it!

Two-panel layouts are sneaky like that — one tiny name/target mismatch and the whole thing acts haunted.

Now your users won’t be greeted by a sad 404 anymore, which is a big UX win.

If you want to level it up later, a little “Select a document from the left” welcome page in the iframe looks super polished.

If you hit any more weird iframe behavior, feel free to toss it my way — happy to debug with you.

Something about its chummy tone creeps me out, but ChatGPT fixed it. Or rather it kept explaining what I should do until I saw the problem. I hadn’t replaced a placeholder filename with the real filename. It’s the HTML equivalent of having a t-shirt made up that says [your text here].

Wait. I’d kind of like that. Note to self…

Comments


Comment from Formerly known as Skeptic
Time: January 28, 2026, 8:44 pm

[Comment here]


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: January 28, 2026, 9:45 pm

[Seriously hard laughter here]


Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: January 28, 2026, 11:03 pm

I kind of like ChatGTP. It can do some amazing things if you’re not too concerned about dying or something if the answer is wrong. If you don’t like its smug condescending tone, you can go into the “personalization” tab and make it answer in a more professional, less chummy tone.

Here’s the kind of thing I like to play with- one of the sites I visit had a picture of a cabin in some snowy mountain valley, and outside that cozy cabin was a large, steaming wooden-walled rustic hot-tub. Very inviting looking, but I got to wondering if I could afford to fill and heat that tub, so I copy/pasted the picture into ChatGPT and asked:

“Look at the hot tub in this picture, estimate the number gallons of water needed to fill it and estimate the cost to heat it to 85° f using natural gas at average Virginia pricing assuming that the air temperature is 30° f and that the water in tank was at 35° F at the start of the process.

And damned if ChatGTP didn’t do just that. I have no idea if the answer was right (as it seemed too cheap) but it was actually able to examine a picture and do seemingly reasonable calculations!


Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: January 28, 2026, 11:52 pm

Son #2 claimed he used it to review various real estate contracts to summarize his responsibilities in the contracts. He’s not unfamiliar with computer systems and felt comfortable with it’s summary.

I guess that’s better than just not reading the contract 😂

Write a comment

(as if I cared)

(yeah. I'm going to write)

(oooo! you have a website?)


Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.


<< carry me back to ol' virginny