Design Emails Using Bootstrap

Wondering how you could apply modern UI design to emails? Here’s the answer. The Problem I don’t know about you - but emails are the last thing that I want to design. I end up sending plain text emails for most of my apps, and that works just fine. However, a few projects have more complex requirements. In one such case, I had to send bills as emails and allow a designer (if not a client power-user) to “code in” the design for the bills. ...

Valuable Site of the Month (Oct '19) - Online HTML Editor

We back with a valuable site of the month after a not-so-brief hiatus. Here’s presenting this month’s pick - an online HTML editor. No.. Not another editor HTML editors are aplenty. Anyone and everyone can whip up a quick site using TinyMCE, CKEditor and the like, provide a preview and call it a day. A bit more effort there and we can have a site-of-the-month editor :) Well, recently I had been creating a few HTML emails. I needed a quick, reliable way to preview whatever HTML content and move on with my work. ...

Email for NodeJS app using separate server on CPanel

Configure email server on a third party host using CPanel, while continuing your app server on your favourite VPS. Background Typically I configure email server to be on the same server as my NodeJS / PHP app. Bad practice? Sure. But, it works just fine for the kind of applications that I write. I can see how horribly this can go wrong though - Your app server goes down and you have no way to send communication to your users Mail servers simply get more spam, more probes - this keeps the server busy for no reason. This means your main app can suffer There are simply better ways to design, without breaking the bank or introducing any complexity - we can just shift mail handling to an external party. ...

Open source and free URL shorteners

URL shorteners shorten your URLs. You have many many products in the market - bit.ly being the most popular. However, with a bit of help from amazing people who have built them, we can use our own URL shorteners. Again, nothing magical here - this was quite an old problem. People wanted to always mask their URL or make it easier for sharing. Here are three open source and free URL shorteners that you can use today! ...

Fake GraphQL APIs for Testing

Speed up your GraphQL learning with fake GraphQL APIs! I love JSON Placeholder, but it serves only REST requests. I had been looking for something similar in GraphQL. Without longer-term, reliable options, I had reverted to creating my own fake GraphQL server. While having my own server is certainly useful, it can become a pain to demonstrate or outline a feature to all - either through a video, blog post, or in public forums. ...

VSCode file shortcuts I can't live without

Here’s a set of VSCode shortcuts that are part of my daily workflow for working with files! We have seen a few VSCode shortcuts earlier, but none ever said - I had enough of them shortcuts. So, here goes. 1. Search text in all files Search text in within all files in workspace using .. Ctrl + Shift + F I used Explorer and Everything before incorporating this extension in my workflow. The biggest advantage is having to to search within the workspace folder - have all other files open in context of current work. ...

Git in VSCode

I have been a great admirer and user of command line tools. They reduce so much time and energy while getting things done. But, on the other hand I have not been a reasonably good user of Git by itself. I could never come to terms with typing in one too many statements to get to where I was going. For example - Compare changes with previous version Check who did changes in a specific version Revert to previous version Check changes to stage / commit, and periodically commit These and many more require far too many commands. These commands were sometimes coded in batch files and copied/pasted whenever I needed them. I just could not remember everything - probably not as good a user of Git as I would like to believe. ...

Server-side technology options and my hosting solutions

Last year I started focusing on web and application development to a greater extent than what I have done in the past. After having done my time with large enterprises, I now work primarily in a super cost-conscious market. All those things speak poorly about my budgeting and planning skills as far as server hosts are concerned. tldr; Use Digital Ocean* Use Hetzner Cloud Problem I build applications that need a backend. I need that backend to be inexpensive but reliable. ...

Install Scoop for Command-line Nirvana

Command line in Windows. You love it when there are Powershell, Cmder and friends. And, you hate it when you cannot install simple programs quickly. Well, hate may be a strong word - but you get the gist. I have tried chocolatey and have a like-dislike relationship with that program. I have also experimented with VMs and anything that exposes more of the command line. None of the programs stuck in my day-to-day flow. For a few projects, I dedicatedly use WSL - but could not quite switch over everywhere. ...

Most Valuable Site of the Month - May 2019

Featured for the millionth time as a most valuable website - a site that generates all icons for free, and for real. I am sick of tired of Google results returning “free” sites that collect all information including my dog’s name and the declare that I need to pay $99 to get darn icon with the darn size. I need to be able to get anything for free. So, why should I pay to generate icons that would take an hour to resize in a free program like Paint.NET or IrfanView? After all, I need to feed this ego that I create value and people totally should pay me for the value delivered through the free for all programs. ...