Category: tech
Not now, Tim Apple
UPDATE:
It is perfectly reasonable to keep half a Terabyte of wallpaper caches, MacOS.
PS: shoutout to
DaisyDisk appDocument Tabs in Google Docs
Today, I ran into
this new feature in Google Docs for the first time.It allows you to create tabs within your document, which become like separate pages or chapters. Every tab is isolated from each other, you cannot scroll from one tab to another. I expect this to lead to a lot of confusion for people unaware of this feature.
Discoverability leaves a lot to be desired.
I am a heavy user of document outlines, which are now integrated in this feature, so it looks like I will be using this anyway 😬.
Added a photos page
I just added a photos page to this site. It’s rather short and needs some optimisation, but I’m working on fixing both of theses issues.
It’s really impressive what you can do with WordPress’ site editor today. Although I start hitting the limits of it. I’ll dive into the theming code later this week.
Self-review your code
Something really resonated with me in the
latest episode of the Under the Radar podcast: the concept of switching context and reviewing your own code before committing.I’m really happy to hear
@marcoarment and @_Davidsmith discuss how they review every commit to validate all code that goes into version control.I often have a hard time selling this habits to junior devs (and even senior devs!). As a consequence I’ve often been rewriting git repository histories to remove passwords, PII1, zip files of several hundreds of megabytes (“git is so slow”) and even malware.
I like to rethink my code architecture while reviewing and often go back to refactor, to take more edge-cases into account or for simplicity.
I love using
Fork for this, a great git UI with a good diff viewer, all in one app.- Personally Identifiable Information, you want to be careful with that ↩︎
Picture:
Rice harvest on Louisiana farm by Karl WiggersNetNewsWire was not updating my RSS feed
NetNewsWire is having trouble refreshing my RSS feed, both on Mac desktop (6.1.8) and iOS (6.1.5 Build 6135).- I tested with an alternative RSS reader: Unread, which updates the feed fine.
- I double checked my caching and expiration headers, which also appear ok.
- I went through the log files and saw many entries for Unread and some for Google bot (hello 👋)
- I removed the feed from NNW and re-added it, but no success…
I’m tempted to try and build the desktop app from source, since
the source is available on Github, but that will require some extra free time.UPDATE 2025.01.02: I installed the TestFlight build (6.1.6 6141) and the issue persists.
UPDATE 2025.01.03: TestFlight build 6.1.6 6142 installed overnight and the issue is fixed 🎉! Now waiting for the next desktop release.
- I tested with an alternative RSS reader:
A word counter for Gutenberg blocks
One of the main goals of – albeit slowly – setting up this blog, is writing more. And I also want to keep track of the length of the posts I make (I’d love to be able to call them articles one time 😉).
That’s why I implemented a word counter today, that displays the words you’ve written, in the editor, as you type. I based the functionality on the code
found here. It didn’t work anymore, but after some research I managed to make it work again.Turns out the Gutenberg editor (aka Block editor) is
often running in an iframe. Which makes it a tiny bit harder to access the blocks in the editor with javascript.
Screenshot of the Block editor with the counter in the top right displaying: 34 words. Download the WordPress plugin
You can find the WordPress plugin
here on Github.What’s next?
I want to improve this functionality with a post-wide counter that displays the total amount of words over every block in the post.
AM/PM vs 24h in WordPress
Software localization is hard. WordPress still struggles with the AM/PM vs 24h setting in some places:
- good: the post scheduler UI on the admin post edit screen
- bad: the Publish date on the same admin post edit screen
- bad: the status text after applying the scheduling
Add capability classes to your html element
Couldn’t come up with the Javascript library that adds capabilities supported by your browser as a class to your html element.
It was
Modernizr, a library way more popular in the more turbulent years of the browser wars and the start of Web 2.031 januari 2025 update: it must be 10 years ago that I had to use this, but today I need to write browser-specific code again 😕.
After fruitlessly searching the web using Google, I asked ChatGPT for an update. It came up with some alternatives:
- platform.js: has been archived by the maintainer (fellow Belgian Mathias Bynens)
- bowser.js: which, if memory serves, even predates Modernizr
- detect.js: a User Agent parser
Switch to Pride Versioning!
@Niki Tonsky: I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning
Rice harvest on Louisiana farm
