web posts page 7

10k Apart

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I have spent much of my free time the last 12 days working on a project for the 10k Apart challenge. 10k Apart is a challenge to make a compelling progressively enhanced, accessible site with 10 KB or less of initial payload per page (more can be lazy-loaded). I decided to build an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, which I had wanted to do since going to a Code Retreat a while back.

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GiveCamp 2016 done

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GiveCamp 2016 is over. Another successful year. The new Cleveland Garlic Festival site is live. I didn’t do much on the site the final day besides for fix some URLs and move some files to help with the launch. I did break away to help another team fix some issues with image sliders on the homepage. Not just any team, but one doing some updates to the Cleveland GiveCamp website. I don’t believe those changes are live yet though. During this, I got to work a little while with my cousin’s friend Dara for the first time.

As usual this year, I recognized a number of people from previous years. My project manager was a project manager from a couple years ago. I talked to several of the people I’ve worked with in the past and have seen multiple years. There is definitely a networking aspect to the event. Some of the people I see at meetups and other events.

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GiveCamp 2016 day 2

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Day 2 of GiveCamp is complete. My team is in quite good shape. We shed one member early on. I too left to be re-purposed, but that didn’t last long. I briefly helped one team determine that, after my attempt to help them hack a plugin, it was time to jump ship to another. They didn’t need my further assistance, and the organizers couldn’t find another place for me, so I went back to my original team. Another of our members went home early. Even at a relaxed pace and searching for things to do, we were able to complete their nice-to-haves and improve some things from their quick-setup state. Tomorrow should be easy.

The event of the day more present on my mind at the moment is that my tent pole broke. When I first lay down in it, I saw the pole going at a weird angle. I got out and pulled the fly partly off to find the pole split and rather sharp. The tent was standing alright, but, not wanting the pole to poke through the fly, I attempted to fix it. I spent like an hour between working on and thinking of a field repair. In the end, nothing really got the broken pieces to stay together when the pole was arched. Now I lay in a slightly tilted, wonky tent, tired My tent is a Eureka Midori, and this is the second Eureka I’ve had the pole break on. Neither had I used very many times, maybe a handful each. Disappointing.

Givecamp 2016 day 1

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First day of GiveCamp 2016. Working on the Cleveland Garlic Festival website. Seems like it’s going to be another relatively easy one, as I think the last few have been. We are rebuilding the site to run on WordPress and be responsive, plus other general improvements as we go. I’m on a team of four plus one organization representative. Things are going smoothly.

Stir Trek 2016 talk videos

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I’m glad that Stir Trek has released videos of its 2016 talks, since I didn’t luck out in getting a ticket this year like I had last year. At least I will (hopefully) be much less tired watching them than when I drove down to Columbus early morning last year. Of course, the videos are good to have even for people who went: These multitrack conferences always seem to have multiple good talks at the same time, including at least one slot with multiple “must see” ones.

Web app manifest, first go

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I’ve added a basic web app manifest to my site. I have not experimented with the results, but I did run it through a web manifest validator mostly to success. I used the MDN guide and the HTML5 doctor article for help. I also read some of the in-progress spec, though it seemed more implementer-friendly. The content of my manifest is currently (prettified):

{
    "background_color": "#4e784e"
    ,"display": "browser"
    ,"icons": [
        {
            "sizes": "64x64"
            ,"src": "favicon.gif"
            ,"type": "image\/gif"
        }
    ]
    ,"lang": "en-US"
    ,"name": "Toby Mackenzie\u0027s site"
    ,"scope": "\/"
    ,"short_name": "\u003Ctoby\u003E"
    ,"start_url": "\/"
    ,"theme_color": "#4e784e"
}

I’m just using Symfony’s JsonResponse object to render a PHP array.

This is one more thing that I really shouldn’t’ve put time into until my site is more fleshed out, but it seemed cool and simple to add.

Line Mode Browser, or progressive enhancement all the way back

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Progressive enhancement is a development strategy meant to provide older and / or less capable browsers with a working website while providing the more capable with a rich, full experience. It is often presented as a set of layers of support, with HTML at its base, then CSS added to that for styles, then JavaScript for advanced behavior. With this, it’s often posited that a well-crafted HTML experience can be used by any browser. However, for really old browsers from the early web, the new web provides many things that can make pages difficult to read, functionality unusable, or even entire sites inaccessible.

Today, I’m going to go back as far as I reasonably can in terms of browser support, to the second web browser ever made, and the first widely supported one, Line Mode Browser. I can’t look at the first, WorldWideWeb, because it was only made for NextStep and, as far as I can tell, isn’t accessible for me to test with. Line Mode is though. It was open-source by the w3c and kept available. I was able to get it with MacPorts with the ‘libwww’ package (run as www on the command line).

Line Mode was based on WorldWideWeb, and in fact was less featured, so it is likely to have any issues WorldWideWeb has and more. I will look at some issues that Line Mode has with modern web pages, and provide some solutions that will improve the abilities of even the oldest browsers to use a page.

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Upgrading my Awstats setup

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I don’t really monitor analytics for my personal sites that often besides for my blogs, for which I use wordpress.com’s analytics. I do have three open-source analytics programs set up for my main sites though: piwik, owa, and awstats. Awstats is the one I’ve tended to look at the least, probably because its interface isn’t as nice as the others and it doesn’t have as much data about visits. However, it is the only one that looks at actual server logs, so it should be the most accurate about basic visit information. The other two use JavaScript, one having an image fallback, so there’s the potential for them to miss visits.

I have my awstats set up as I described in 2010. I keep the configuration and the data separate from the install to make updates easier. However, it had been so long since I upgraded that I forgot how it was set up and fumbled a little before finding that article and figuring out what had to be done. In order to make it easier for next time, I created myself a simple little script to handle the upgrade for me:

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ASCII art source code signature for my site

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Sometimes I see sites with ASCII art hidden in comments in their source code. I’ve long admired the retro computer nerdiness of ASCII art. At times, I’ve wanted to add some to my site, but have been reluctant because of the extra bites it would add to page weight, the difficulty in making it look good, the lack of a subject I felt worth it, and the problems they can have with differing fonts and display widths. However, after adding an easter egg recently, I was more receptive to the idea when reminded about it by the source code of archive.org.

I spent some time this past weekend trying various different ASCII versions of my name. Some examples:

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