Building the Fediverse.to requires hitting the API endpoints of thousands of servers. Some of these servers are huge, some are tiny, and almost all of them are managed by just 1 person or a small team. Being a sysadmin myself I know how painful it is for a server to crash due to mysteriously large amounts traffic from seemingly nowhere, so I put together a small list of dos and donts to make sure…
Blogging about individual self-contained ideas is great. But some ideas require a more structured approach. Chaining together simple ideas into one big whole is a great journey for both the writer and the reader. Which is why I wanted to add a Series feature to this Jekyll blog. As you may have guessed already, Jekyll’s high degree of customsation makes this a breeze. Goal What I want to achieve…
Adding a light and dark mode to my side project www.fediverse.to was a fun journey. I especially loved how intuitive the entire process was. The prefers-color-scheme CSS property contains the user’s color scheme - light or dark. We then define SASS or CSS styles for both modes, and the browser applies the style the user wants. That’s it! The seamless flow from operating system to browser to…
So… I finally got bored with Nautilus. Ubuntu has been my daily driver for the last several years. I remember when Linux used to be a second-class citizen in the desktop space, only used by nerds and devs who could unravel its arcane and obscure mysteries. But it has come a long way. Not only is it a lot more user-friendly with a plethora of customisation options, but Steam, and especially Proton,…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a search engine for Fediverse instances! The idea was to help new users, Facebook refugees, and Twitter rage-quitters find their ideal home on the fediverse. Fediverse instances are either for a wide audience or centered around a theme, a language, a hobby, or all of the above. The fediverse ecosystem has been growing like crazy - there are now close…
Pretty URLs, aka vanity URLs, aka tiny URLs, are great for improving SEO and the UX. They’re shorter versions of a domain, making them useful for copy-pasting and printing. There are already plenty of domain shortening services out there. But with Jekyll and Netlify I can configure pretty URLs all by my lonesome! What I want to achieve is as follows. Every article on this website has a number in…
I’m a huge fan of open-source! One of the little ways I’ve supported the cause is by keeping this blog open since the very beginning. You can always browse the full source-code here . The reason is partly to let people see the history of changes behind each page. But also because I didn’t find many open-source Jekyll blogs to learn from when I started down this road. So I keep this website open in…
This website has been text-oriented for a long time now. The decision to add article banners and thumbnails is a recent one. I stayed away from images for a long time since handling and optimising images can be a PITA. I was glad to find that optipng , jpegoptim , and imagemagick already exist to solve this problem for me. My plan is as follows. I already have all article images in my…
Search is a must-have for any website or application. A simple search widget can allow users to comb through your entire blog. Or allow customers to browse your inventory. Building a custom photo gallery? Add a search box. Website search functionality is available from a variety of third-party vendors. Or you can take the DIY approach and build the entire backend to answer search API calls.…
You’re likely already familiar with media queries. They’re in widespread use for making websites responsive. The width and height properties contain the viewport’s dimensions. We then use CSS to render different layouts at different dimensions. The prefers-color-scheme media query works the same way. The user can configure their operating system to use a light or dark theme. prefers-color-scheme…