Tangible Bytes

Website developers (like myself) often end up with a few websites we support - whether these are promoting a business, running a blog, for a side project, or a site for a friend or hobby.

Since these are often low to no budget and can’t be prioritised for work at busy times they need to be

• cheap
• low maintenance
• easy to set up
• blazingly fast

I’ve been working with SQL databases for over 20 years but this year was my first time using a NoSQL database.

Previous conversations with developers often went along the lines of them trying to tell me NoSQL is “better” and me not quite seeing a benefit. At the time I never really had a reason to try something different - what I had worked and was low risk.

Recently I had cause to adopt Google’s Firebase hosting and Cloud Firestore database and this is what I learned.

In the world of Web development the words “Best Practice” are often thrown about as if implementation was a trivial detail and giving the impression that everyone else must be doing all this already.

Then you implement these and find that it isn’t so trivial - especially when you try and combine each practice.

I wanted to experiment with making this site into a Progressive Web App (PWA) while maintaining good security through Content Security Policy (CSP) headers and long cache times for static assets.

Hugo - The world’s fastest framework for building websites is pretty awesome. It’s what I use to manage this site.

But much of the web development world has moved in the direction of JavaScript, npm, and Webpack.

So how can you run a Hugo website and manage the embedded JavaScript and CSS that are most commonly managed with npm and Webpack?

One of the things I love about the web is the flexibility it brings.

How I see this site may not be how you see it - and maybe you don’t see it at all but are using a screen reader.

Supporting old technologies is frustrating for web developers, we all want to use new features and the latest tools.

“Only” 5% of website traffic is coming from people using Internet Explorer

Even Microsoft say people should upgrade

Supporting additional browsers costs time and money.

Why should we do it ?

How did I balance all the other requirements of a website with the need to minimise energy use?

To make this site cleaner than 98% of web pages tested

Part of what makes the web so brilliant is in it’s flexibility - the information is conveyed mostly in digital text and unlike paper we don’t all have to experience that in the same way.

Some people can’t see the images in a website so we can add “alt” text which replaces the image for these people.

The problem comes when the image doesn’t actually have a meaning - then what should the Alternative text be?

I was recently updating a very old laptop for use in some network testing - all it needs to do is connect to wifi.

I couldn’t understand why I was getting a blank screen after grub loaded

I tried various install media, tried editing grub conf.

The best I could get was a screen saying

Booting a command list

What’s the difference between providing a rejection handler for a promise and catching errors ?

And why Does the React AJAX FAQ say

// Note: it's important to handle errors here
// instead of a catch() block so that we don't swallow
// exceptions from actual bugs in components.