WWW posts page 4

Playing with GitHub Pages

in

This past weekend, I started playing with GitHub Pages for the first time. It took a while to figure out, but was somewhat fun. I’ve been interested in it for a while, but was unsure of how to do what I wanted, such as building with PHP, Sass, and Rollup. Turns out it was fairly easy with GitHub Actions to do most any sort of build steps I want. It is very interesting for free static site web-hosting.

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Github repo backup script

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For some time, I’ve been wanting to set up a backup for my Github repos. Technically they are all backed up by my local copies, which are also backed up when I back up my local computer. However, I wanted something that was sure to have everything from all the repos (all branches, tags, etc) and could be set up and run continuously on a yet-to-be-created backup server. I have create a bash script to do this for me.

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Ideas: Cascading Behavior Sheets, a declarative alternative to JS

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I have had the idea for some time that the web ought to have a declarative format to define behavior on elements like it does for styles (CSS). It would be an alternative to JavaScript (JS) that would be as robust as CSS, simplifying adding and defining common behaviors. There are a lot of things sites do frequently that can take a fair amount of work for a new person to implement, as well as require a payload sent over the wire. For people who don’t need complications beyond standard, this could be provided by the browser with some configuration in a simple sheet. I think there should be a Cascading Behavior Sheet (CBS) standard for the web.

Potential advantages:

  • robust forward and backward compatibility like CSS
  • simpler, easier to learn format than JS
  • little to write or think about for common functionality
  • little to send over wire for common functionality
  • more performant native implementation possible
  • declarative
  • familiar syntax to CSS devs
  • simple to connect behavior broadly to chosen selectors
  • cascade, @media, @support, etc to limit which and when behaviors apply
  • automatic handling of attaching and removing behaviors when they apply / don’t, including new DOM elements
  • maintain separation of concerns that keeping JS and CSS separate provides
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Annoying bot and Cloudflare free rate limiting

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Some German bot(s) seemed to take interest in one of Cogneato’s sites, Rockin Houston. The aging site is fairly inefficient with a lot of data, and the bot was causing high load on our DB server. I have implemented a PHP blocker for certain IPs, but I wanted something more broadly applicable. I made a rate limiting rule on Cloudflare that should block this type of behavior and prevent it from even hitting our server once the rule triggers.

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Vim autocomplete setup

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After hours of playing and learning some details of vimscript, I have improved the autocomplete in vim almost to where I like it. I’ve made it work more like some GUI editors, eg Sublime and Atom, where it pops open automatically as I type and I can tab to apply the selected choice or otherwise type on and ignore it, and otherwise clean up the experience. The main thing I would like to add is fuzzy matching. I’d also like it to match more in-document words and work for more unknown file-types in a generic way.

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WordPress dark mode for admin, quick and dirty

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I have been loving that so many apps and sites have been moving to supporting dark modes. I find it easier on my eyes, especially in the evening / night. One place that I frequently visit that I’m disappointed doesn’t support dark mode yet is WordPress’s admin area.

There is a Dark Mode plugin that can add this, but it is primarily for the front-end of the site, which in my case already has a dark mode and I didn’t want to touch. Plus it’s a lot of third party code for something that should be built in and probably will be at some point. I decided it was time to look into if I could just inject a quick and dirty stylesheet to change some colors and improve the situation for now.

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