Posts

I am a big fan of Vue and cannot breathe without static sites. So, it is only natural that I play around and implement Vue-based static sites for fun and profit. Here’s a distilled-down version of my experience with Vuepress. The Situation I create static sites that are “real” websites. Typically the following factors in a static site generator help - A cool, easy-to-customise home page Themes/starter projects that make life easy Plugins that can extend functionality of core software Although I had played around Vuepress quite a bit, I always ended up choosing non-Vue technologies like Hugo, or Vue-based static site generators like Gridsome or Saber.land. ...

Here’s a simple way to organize your taxonomies and have a bird’s eye view of the number of posts per category/tag in Hugo. The Problem As techformist.com grew, I became more and more disorganised in maintaining taxonomies. I had some interesting situations - a “static-site” category coexist with “static sites” category confusion b/w why I chose a few terms to be tags rather than categories in their own right the recurring need to “rethink taxonomy structure” depending on the flavour of the month and time of the day This often required me to go back and change a few taxonomy terms, or to reorganize site structure in order to provide better visibility to chosen topics. ...

Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, Wordpress? Or, why should you invest in yourself rather than in platforms? The Problem Developers should write and write often. It may be anything - code snippets, ideas, thoughts, design principles, standards and what not. I have found that writing down things often forces me to solidify abstractions and get more clarity. But, where to write? The Options Wordpress is the past. Though I continue to host a few of my blogs - it is just laziness preventing me from migrating over to better things. Wordpress is often slow, theme design is frustrating (if you are not in WP/PHP world that is), and in general does not carry itself quite well nowadays. ...

Aren’t you following the right way to git? Are you frustrated with the message “There is no tracking information for the current branch”? Keep calm and read on. The Problem I create new Git repositories all the time - just like any other developer. I am too stupid to notice the small things and learn my lessons - unlike any other developer. Often I mix up creating repositories on the GitHub website and in local computer, thereby confusing Git. I happily create a repository with a README, add remote URL, try to do a pull.. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Debounce operations in Vue using this 10 line script. Avoid loadash and friends. What is debounce? Delay and throttle operations to wait and collect user input before doing something with the input. The “something” can be updating another field, doing an API call, or starting a timer to self-destruct. Did you not debounce earlier? Yes, I did. reusable debounce function strange throttling effect to allow function call only once awkward debounce using generators But, not in Vue. ...

Centralize all error, warning and info alerts in one place. I like v-alert and tend to over-use it. It enables us to show detailed notifications (error or otherwise) - without significantly causing user inconvenience. I find v-alert more suitable in my apps than using, say, popup alerts that interrupt users, or “toast” notifications which I find unsuitable for detailed messages. I use v-alerts to - display error or informational messages post an API call show form validation errors that cannot be shown against individual controls guide user action How do I alert? Using alert in Vuetify is simple enough. Introduce this one line in your components that needs alerts. ...

Include all content of your posts in your site feed when using Hugo static site generator. By default Hugo will include only summary in your website feed (e.g. in /index.xml). Your theme may already provide a way to provide full content instead of just the summary. If it doesn’t, you can make those simple changes yourself. Create a new file rss.xml in layouts\_default\ folder in your site root directory. Include following content (as of v0.58) - ...