I spent part of this morning wandering around BluSup on my phone.
That is becoming one of my favorite ways to use the site now. I hit Surprise Me, let BluSup choose where I go, and see what I rediscover.
Sometimes I remember something I had forgotten.
Sometimes I find something that makes me smile.
And sometimes I fall straight through the floorboards into the workshop.
That happened today.
Surprise Me sent me somewhere that looked, at first, like another BluSup tool.
Instead I landed on a plain-text developer report called BluSup Guide Helper Simplify V1.
The first line said:
Changed files:
Then came a bunch of PHP and CSS filenames and paths.
After that:
What changed:
Install/copy instructions:
Test links:
Verification steps:
In other words, I had discovered some genuine dead-end developer debris.
It wasn't dangerous.
It wasn't broken.
It simply wasn't something a visitor should ever have been sent to.
BluSup should show visitors the house, not the lumber pile behind it.
That little accident exposed something else, too.
Earlier, while wandering around on the phone, I had reached a tool that didn't have BluDot, the little blue button in the upper-right corner that gives me a familiar way to move around BluSup.
That mattered.
One of the things we have been building into BluSup is the idea that you should be able to wander almost anywhere without feeling trapped.
Surprise Me gets you lost on purpose.
BluDot helps you find your way again.
So this morning Blue and I followed the debris.
We found the raw developer report hiding in the Rabbit Hole inventory and removed it from Surprise Me.
Then we audited the tools and found the couple of pages that had somehow escaped without BluDot.
Fixed those too.
None of this was some gigantic programming breakthrough.
That's actually the interesting part.
A system can be technically correct and still have little splinters sticking out of it.
You discover those splinters by using the thing.
Not by staring at the source code.
Not by running another checklist.
Not by asking whether every PHP file passes syntax validation.
You wander around.
You click things.
You get lost.
You notice when something feels wrong.
And then you fix it.
Yesterday we turned Surprise Me into something much bigger than a random-link button.
Today it started doing something I hadn't really anticipated.
It became a way for me to rediscover BluSup itself.
Old Posts.
Places.
Photos.
Tools.
Projects.
Things Blue and I built weeks ago that my eighty-year-old brain may have quietly filed somewhere I can't immediately retrieve.
Then suddenly BluSup puts one of them back in front of me.
"Oh yeah. I remember that."
That's pretty damned wonderful.
And occasionally it also puts a pile of PHP filenames in front of me.
That's useful too.
Because now the pile is gone.
The Rabbit Hole got a little cleaner today.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole →
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