All posts with the tag "webdev"
Inspired by discourse’s link expansion I am rolling out expansions for one line links on the blog waylonwalker. I was able to find a gatsby plugin gatsby-remark-embedder that expands one line links for social cards for popular platforms like twitter and YouTube through a repose from Kyle Mathews to my tweet.
https://twitter.com/kylemathews/status/1329817928666005504
This covers a couple of use cases I have with very little effort.
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I wanted a super simple way to cross-link blog posts that require as little effort as possible, yet still looks good in vanilla markdown in GitHub. I have been using a snippet that puts HTML into the markdown. While this works, it’s more manual/difficult for me does not look the best, and does not read well as
The new card should be fully automated to expand with title, description, and cover image. Bonus if I am able to attach a comment behind it.
If you can call it a card 🤣. This card was just an image wrapped in an anchor tag and a paragraph tag. I found this was the most consistent way to get an image narrower and centered in both GitHub and dev.to.
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When first learning to code its very common to hard code everything right into the code. This happens with most folks in just about any language. Whether its HTML or markdown for front end content, or even hardcoding parameters in our backend languages like python, or node.js.
Hard coding everything right into your code makes it really hard for non-technical collaborators to join. It makes it nearly impossible to hand websites off to clients without needing to come back for routine updates.
The cms generally come with a rich content editor that feels more like something most folks are used to. There are buttons for changing the font, font-size, adding images, bold, italics, etc.
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I just did a quick refactoring of my JAMStack blog urls. Some didn’t fit with my style, some had _ that I wanted to switch to -, and others were ridiculously long. I’ve been using forestry as my CMS, I write many of my posts there, and sometimes it picks some crazy file names (based on my titles). It was time to refactor.
Large Refactor At The Command Line
When refactorings similar to this get really big I often need to do some project wide find an replace, I usually do this right from the command line.
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Often when reading through javascript examples you will find some arrow functions use parentheses () while others use braces {}. This key difference is that parentheses will implicitly return the last statement while braces require an explicit return statement. It is important to understand the difference between them because it is likely that you will find code examples of both and trying to edit code written differently than you’re used to may have unintended consequences.
Arrow functions are one-liner functions in javascript that have two main syntactical ways to create the code block. with parentheses and braces. Let’s take a look at both ways of creating arrow functions so that when we come accross them in the wild it will all make sense.
Here is an example of an arrow function that will implicitly return the last statement without the return keyword. I believe that these are a bit more restricted in that you cannot set variables inside them. They are a little bit more concise and great for one-liners.
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I am working through Wes Bos’s beginnerjavascript.com/ I just hit module 18 on hoisting. It’s something that I always knew was there, Its not something I typically see used or use myself.
Do you have any use cases that you use hoising? Why? It seems like a really cool feature in any language that uses it, but I dont really notice it in use.
There are many articles that cover this in far more depth, but its the idea that variable declarations and functions are defined before they are executed. This means that it doesnt matter if you call a function before or after it is defined.
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Getting a custom scrollbar on your site makes it stand out a bit compared to the very plain stock one that are on most sites. This is how I set mine up on my gatsby site.
Inspired by Wes Bos’s new uses.tech I wanted a custom scrollbar on my personal site. I had tried to do it in the past, but gave up after it was not working.
Since uses.tech is open source I jumped on github, searched for scroll and found this layout.js.
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Moving into 2020 I have been really leaning on using purple as my theme color everywhere more and more. Its time for an update to my personal site, not just because it feels plain, not just because the cover art I am using for dev.to doesn’t fit my current card layout, but because I feel inspired and I want to.
This is what we are working with. It has been my card design for at least a year now. Its not bad but, its a bit play, doesnt fit my new cover art style, and that date is not working over top of the cover art text.
I have been really into using a deep purple lately. It is a neutral color that does not get enough respect, i.e. it’s not used as frequently and kinda stands out when used.
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It was so easy to get a professional looking navbar with just 3 lines of code. This package seriously is so usable on mobile it is ridiculous. I found this package from day-4 of the 100 days of gatsby challenge. It is by the wonderful man who brought us gatsbyjs Kyle Mathews, so you know its gotta be good.
installation is easy
npm i react-headroom
There was no instructions for es6 style imports that are common with gatsbyjs sites like mine, but it was intuitive to figure out.
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I finally fixed my Styled-Components in gatsby.js. I am starting a redesign of my website. I have started cross posting to dev.to more regularly. With that I have been making more detailed cover images at the recommended 1000x420. These images get cut off on my own site, which is a bit ridiculous to have my own content not look right on my own site. But before we start a heavy redesign I have a small issue that has plagued the site for at least a year!
I have a small issue that has plagued the site for at least a year!
I have been using styled components in my gatsby.js site for about a year now. And it has been plagued by styled-components not being in the ssr causing some jank in the styles being loaded. You can see it in the lighthouse performance report below. It generally loads super quick, and is only caused on first load. Anything using the gatsby <Link/> component typically is fine and unaffected by the issue.
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I have happily had my personal site waylonwalker.com hosted on netlify for nearly 2 years now. In fact I have hosted about a dozen different toy projects to play with on there, 4 of which have gone far enough to get a custom domain name. They are fast to deploy and consistently do so on every git push to main.
I have recently started playing with zeit again. I really like their cli tool, its dead simple and makes sense. I tried the netlify one early on and dont think I really gave it much of a chance. I was able to backup a site we were modifying by saving everything locally (literally control+s) and running now in the command line.
While I was on the site I realized that when switching to gatsby v2 I had deployed it to now.sh while testing, before cutting over to the updated one on netlify. It has been building every version since without issue!
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I love using URL shorteners to easily share links without hitting character limits, but they loose their meaning. Services like bit.ly will save my links for me so that I can find them, but I would rather them to be easy to remember. https://bit.ly/2ruLwQz does not roll of the tongue so well.
I recently discovered a really cool feature of netlify that I have always looked past, _redirects. It is so simple cool and powerful, every netlify site should do this!
simply add a _redirects file to the root of your your published site with the following format. The trick I found with my gatsby site was that it needed to be in my static directory /static/_redirects, not root. Next you just put space separated links on separate lines. #’s can be used for comments.
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Adding an rss feed to your gatsby js site is super simple.
Testing out forestry.io
I still ♥️ your product dont be
forestry is simple
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select rowid, key, raw, store_time, expire_time, access_time, access_count, tag, size, mode, filename from Cache where key=‘e3cd37c97980ab2c’; ’e3cd37c97980ab2c’ ’e3cd37c97980ab2c' select rowid, key, raw, store_time, expire_time, access_time, access_count, tag, size, mode, filename from Cache where key=‘c14050404a107d5e’;
For what we are creating in these posts d3 is way overkill and very verbose, but I need to start somewhere! These are just stepping stones into real custom visualizations that cannot be done in any other tool today. I still cannot explain how excited I am to say “I created that in d3!!!”
For what we are creating in these posts d3 is way overkill and very verbose, but I need to start somewhere! These are just stepping stones into real custom visualizations that cannot be done in any other tool today. I still cannot explain how excited I am to say “I created that in d3!!!”
Today I will be learning about d3 scales, and adding them to the bar chart that we created yesterday. Follow along as I try to create something interesting.
maybe a few days ago…. give me a break I have a lot of other priorities
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