Ben Christel's Homepage

I'm Ben. By day I write code for Khan Academy; by night I write everything else. This website is the gateway to my many projects.

Cyberspace Curation

My Web Portal - A searchable catalog of links I've bookmarked.
The Wayward Web - A webring. A collaborative effort to map the useful, human parts of the web.

Process to Processes - A draft of my upcoming book about software development
Ben's Guide to Software Development - A newsletter about software, and, let's be real, a bunch of other stuff too.
Essays on this site.
Bliki - My personal blog / wiki / digital garden about software, with 250+ topic-focused pages on everything from abstraction to wholeness.

Projects I actively use and maintain.

Culture Machine - The digital equivalent of touching grass. Thousands of hand-picked YouTube videos to amuse, confuse, and delight you, played in a neverending random sequence.
Druthers - Instantly grok your group's priorities with a ranked-choice poll. A collaboration with Gavin Morgan.
mdsite - A modern generator for old-school static sites and HTML books. It turns any tree of Markdown files into a website, complete with auto-generated navigation links.
marss - A markdown-to-RSS converter. Turns your microblog or changelog into an RSS feed.
Taste - Simple, speedy JavaScript test framework
hypersearch - Powers the searchbar on the web portal page.
Bastion - A big directory of links. The predecessor of the web portal.
Cookbook - Hearty one-pot vegetarian meals.
Audition - A command-line tool that keeps the prose description of your conlang up to date with its morphology and lexicon.
The One Grammar to Rule Them All - The Lisp of conlangs. A syntax template for people who don't want to think about syntax anymore.
wwwebring - A fully clientside webring widget for static sites. Powers the Wayward Web.
LynX - My Linux Mint theme. Re-skins Linux to look and feel like "big cat"-era Mac OSX. Don't ask me how it's pronounced.
autokeyconf - Rebinds shortcut keys system-wide on Linux.
"Frost" theme for Docky - An OSX-style dock for Linux.
yt - Watch YouTube without ads or tracking. Pairs great with LeechBlock.
Meditation Timer with background noise, and bells at 5-minute intervals.

Projects I haven't done anything with in a while.

Dunmanifestin - Recursive madlib engine, designed for generating D&D characters and settings. Made in collaboration with Gavin Morgan.
The Cave - Helps you keep track of short-term tasks with deep dependencies.
Auracle - A word generator for conlangs. Give it some examples of your desired aesthetic, and get more in return.
Aether Author - Stream-of-consciousness writing tool. Hides everything but the last few characters, so you can write without your writing getting in the way.
Hashema - a Ruby gem for checking if a data structure conforms to a schema / type definition. Designed to be more ergonomic and flexible than JSON Schema.

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