App Attack — In-Class Quiz Submission #2

Learning Machines, Thinking Systems

Reviewed April 2026 · lujiahao · Producing Technology

Loaded SRC URL

https://producingtechnology.com/65-apps/lujiahao_179402_15200390_learning-machines.html

App Summary

This app renders a personal ML research blog called "Learning Machines, Thinking Systems" (v0.1.0). It displays a static homepage with a navigation bar (Home, Series, Reading Shelf, Subscribe), a featured blog post titled "The Blog I Wish Existed When I Started ML Research", a list of what the blog would teach, a typical post structure outline, an author bio section for "Andrew" (@jl4729), and an email newsletter subscription widget with frequency and format preferences. The data is attributed to producingtechnology.com and appears to be rendered from a structured JSON source.

Observed Behavior

The page loaded and rendered all major sections: nav, featured post, content outline, author bio, and newsletter widget.
The featured post displayed its date (February 25, 2026), hashtags (#research-craft, #ml-foundations), and a subtitle correctly.
The "What this blog would teach" bullet list and "A typical post structure" numbered list both rendered properly.
The author section showed a name, handle (@jl4729), bio, and topic tags (machine-learning, systems, research-craft, hci).
The newsletter widget displayed frequency ("weekly") and format ("plain_text") preferences as static text fields.

Things That Didn't Work as Expected

The nav links (Home, Series, Reading Shelf, Subscribe) appeared but did not navigate anywhere — all were non-functional dead links.
The newsletter "Subscribe" widget had no actual input field or submit button — users cannot enter an email address or sign up.
The format field displayed the raw JSON value "plain_text" with an underscore instead of a formatted label like "Plain Text."
The featured post had no "Read More" or clickable link — there was no way to navigate to the full article content.
The version badge "v0.1.0" appeared in the title area, which looked like a leftover development artifact rather than intentional UI.
Author tags like "machine-learningsystemsresearch-crafthci" were concatenated without spacing or separators, making them hard to read.

Improvement Prompt

Please improve this ML blog app with the following fixes and additions:

Fix the author tags so each tag renders as a separate pill/badge with proper spacing — split them by a delimiter in the JSON (e.g., comma or array) rather than concatenating into one string.
Replace the raw "plain_text" value in the newsletter widget with a properly formatted label ("Plain Text"), and apply the same formatting to any other underscore-separated JSON values displayed to users.
Add a working email input field and a "Subscribe" button to the newsletter section so users can actually sign up.
Make the featured post title a clickable link, and either render a full post view or show an expanded excerpt when clicked.
Remove the version number "v0.1.0" from the visible page title — move it to a hidden meta tag or footer if needed for versioning.
Make the nav bar links functional — at minimum, the "Subscribe" link should scroll to the newsletter section, and "Home" should scroll to the top.

Loaded SRC URL

App Summary

Observed Behavior

Things That Didn't Work as Expected

Tags

Improvement Prompt