It’s pretty amazing how time flies. I just realized it’s been over a decade since I published my RadioAlphabet site. A little toy project to help me learn the RadioAlphabet. I was never fully satisfied with it because the user has to type letters. I mean, it did its job, to teach the NATO alphabet, but still. It would have been more fun to call out the words. Well, now you can.
The back story is that Ionos, the outfit that was hosting the original RadioAlphabet.com, wanted to charge for SSL certificates. That got me reviewing the subscription fees at Ionos, and looking around to check out the competitive landscape. There are similar services for a lot less. So I will avail myself of that.
In the meantime, I wanted to improve my SEO stance with RadioAlphabet, hence the certificate. I also decided that after 12 years it was high time to rework the site. So Claude Code and I spent a couple of days rejigging the thing. It used to be a little PHP and a lot of JavaScript. Now it’s all JS in Nuxt. And, while you can still type the words, if you want, it’s much easier to just call them out verbally. You can even call out Next to move on to the next word. I’ve also reworked the scoring mechanism: hits and fails are tracked. But you can redeem the fails: for every five hits in a row of a given letter, it will reduce the fails by one. When you have a failed letter, it will be 9 times more likely to appear. For two fails, the letter will be 25x more likely to appear. So you’ll get plenty of opportunities to redeem your failures.
I also reworked the AdSense, to insure there were no issues impeding the flow (trickle) of money.
While fixing the AdSense issues, I saw there were problems with this NotoriousWebmaster blog. I plan on addressing them with Claude, as well.
So, please visit RadioAlphabet.com, tell your friends about it, mention it in your socials. Thanks for your help.