Blog posts from the feed-en-tech channel (@feed-en-tech)
Turning off our Fediverse instance and DigitalOcean VPS.
We decided to shut down bots.reinhart1010.id Fediverse instance as well as our old VPS instance at DigitalOcean.
Site Updates: Making things nicer and more SEO-friendly.
A week after we announced the new release of our site, we have finally added support for: oEmbed: Still the most basic ("type": "link") kind of oEmbed, so don't expect for fancy blockquotes or iframes to pop up when embedding from our site. GitHub commit 5103064 Open Graph, Twitter, and other SEO meta tags: GitHub commit 0deab0b Cover/Featured Images, because some of our blog posts, like this, used this feature to give some context to the post content. GitHub commit fc79861 We also changed our emphasis colors from blue to magenta (or officially "fuchsia" in our color palette) and violet, for bold and hyperlinks, respectively! A throwback to the days when Reinhart, as a consecutive class secretary, used magenta and violet whiteboard markers to write announcements to make it stand out from other, teacher-used marker colors (black, blue, red, and green)! ...or maybe not just for announcement, like *that* mobile game concept heavily inspired by Snapchat. Anyway, we have also fixed our sharing integration, which you can learn more on commit 773b8fa. TL;DR: No more random \n or ${titleAndDescription} appearing in the shared content. The latter was originally used for our Astro-based webapp, though. And lastly, we're committed to further improve our blog content caching process as well as optimizing our images for use in our home page. That why, current Lighthouse results shows that our home page now require shorter time to render all the resources, but with a consequence of higher Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). That's all for now, back to work. Things that are currently prioritized so far are: Reimplement Pingbacks and Webmentions Encouraging people to "comment" directly through Webmentions Reimplement Search Reimplement RSS and Atom feed
Introducing the new reinhart1010.id (feat T-3000)
After two years of using WordPress, we decided that WordPress is still not good enough to fine-tune our website appearance and experience. And, as a mental holiday for me after finishing a significant part of my thesis, I decided to throw away WordPress on our main site, www.reinhart1010.id, and touch some HTML grass to rebuild our website. Long story short, after throwing away our supposedly-to-be Remix and Astro projects, we decided to start over, just right after the thesis, using Laravel. Sorry, Derrick and Houston, but I still love you all (>_ ). Things that are coming back! 1. Dark mode and illuminated glass cards! Did you know that we already implemented dark mode using JavaScript, CSS swapping, and cookies since back in 2014? And how we fought several times in WordPress to make great dark themes like this? Today, we are very, very excited to announce that dark mode, and that cool illuminated cards are coming back. We have also improved how these illuminated, glass cards look under light mode. And as a fallback for browsers who do not support the background blur effect, you can hover or tap on these cards to make it more opaque and contrast, too. 2. Our legendary system font stack is back, now also in serif! Our legendary, diverse system font stack is back and we dropped the webfonts, so we can reallocate the network resources to download some specific fonts which are not available or poorly represented in many operating systems (like Comic Sans and Papyrus). And we have researched and found the best serif system font stack which can be readily used by websites today. We will cover that up in the upcoming post, but spoiler alert, font-family: ui-serif, "Aptos Serif", Constantia, "Charter", "STIX Two Text", "Libertinus Serif", "Linux Libertine O", "Linux Libertine G", "Linux Libertine", "DejaVu Serif", "Bitstream Vera Serif", "Roboto Serif", "Noto Serif", "Times New Roman", serif Things that are not yet but coming back. Of course, since we decided to move away from WordPress, there are still many features which are not yet reimplemented in T-3000, our official project name for our site redesign. It also got a cool slogan too, "Replacing reinhart1010.id, one nanite at a time" (aka. while ensuring most WordPress-specific routes and API calls can be executed with no necessary change on client). We will prioritize the following features, group by tiers, to reimplement and bring new support for our new website. Tier 1: Search and Blog Archives We will bring back support for searching blog posts, viewing blog archives (e.g. by year or by category), pagination, and so. Tier 2: SEO and Microformats Yeah, we will painstakingly placing proper microformats data, the rel=me attributes,. Tier 3: Comments, ActivityPub, Pingbacks, Webmentions, and Webrings Most of these features are related to our IndieWeb integration. However, we will reintroduce ActivityPub directly on our site, so you can directly follow, react, and comment our posts (again) via Mastodon, Threads (by Instagram), and other platforms, too!
Another color palette update!
Our commitment towards responsible digital storytelling.
Re: Why I quit being a tech "influencer"
Hi, and congrats for jumping out from the tech influencer bandwagon! As a form of motivation, you might not know that GitHub were actually co-founded by two people who still exist today without a personal blog website, and another two having personal blog sites that are nothing but plain old boring blue links, like Daniel Stenberg, the creator of cURL, and Pieter Levels, in case you know about him. Those influencers, as I personally called them Recycled Developers, often shared things which are not always technically accurate, especially in the long term. Even in DEV, a blog post named 17 Compelling Reasons To Start Ditching TypeScript Now was suddenly inspired someone else to write 18 Reasons to Use TypeScript SINCE YESTERDAY. It is as if that one technology, language, or framework will always be good enough and they shall defend their opinions at all costs. But the truth is, neither JS or TS are better to learn and use, and a better developer should be able to weight and choose the right parts for their project stack. And in fact, many of the tech jobs require from you, unless if you're into DevRel (Developer Relations), documentation, or writing tutorials like in MDN and Kodeco (formerly RyanWenderlich.com), is to build and maintain products through well-designed code, not well-designed content. Now I'm interested to read your ebook before it's gone, but that link redirects to http://localhost:3000/products/level-up-your-career-today-developer-edition/ for some reason. It might be interesting to compare it with my perspective as a developer who have done "classic" web development since 2014, Node.js since 2016, C in 2019, Java and PHP/Laravel in 2020, then Python, Swift, React (including Next and Remix), Go, Vala, and beyond over the last few years. But one thing for sure, everyone can start their dev career without forcing them to use HTML/CSS/JS, or Python, or Swift, or back to the good-old C. Concepts are more important to learn, and let those syntaxes and functions follow. (>_ ) 💕
What is the "shell" of Bearers of the Shells?
Sure, we found out that may people don't understand the shell thing we mean for the term "Bearers of the Shells". We're not selling seashells and don't own some shares on the Royal Dutch Shell, anyway. The shell, as in BOTS here is the computer shell, and we found it difficult to translate its meaning into non-English languages. Most languages just transliterate the word, anyway, because at the world of computing, the shell is a metaphor to a kind of the computer program that allows you to interact with other computer programs. Today, you can say that computer shells are quite similar to "skins" in Android (Samsung's One UI, MIUI, Google Pixel, etc.) or "desktop environments" in Linux and BSD operating systems. However, it's not always true. So, to understand what is the true meaning of the computer shell and the shell of BOTS, let's look at this research article (PDF) from 1965 written by the authors who first coined the word "shell". Shell, as the computer program. We may envision a common procedure called automatically by the supervisor whenever a user types in some message at his console, at a time when he has no other process in active execution under console control (presently called command level). This procedure acts as an interface between console messages and subroutine. The purpose of such a procedure is to create a medium of exchange into which one could activate any procedure, as if it were called from the inside of another program. Hereafter, for simplification, we shall refer to that procedure as the ''SHELL". The SHELL: A Global Tool for Calling and Chaining Procedures in the System Wait, what is procedure? supervisor? console? interface? To make you understand these meanings: computers run instructions in a logical order, most commonly (from the era of punch cards) from top to bottom. That's why we call these ordered set of instructions as procedures. You can call them as subsets of computer algorithms, though. Next, just like real-life supervisors, supervisors handles the execution of these instructions to prevent some technical conflicts like dividing numbers by zero. The console is all the physical buttons and switches which humans can use to communicate with the computer (today, they are completely replaced with keyboards and touch screens). And interface is a way for computers to pass information between computers, programs/procedures, or with humans (hence the name, User Interface (UI)). The SHELL here is neither an acronym or backronym. It is a metaphor of an outer part of the computer system that is intentionally exposed to interact with the user. The SHELL was invented during the early days of command-line interfaces, and that's why people often exchange the term shell with command-line. Note that, the command-line is the interface, aka. how do you interact with the computer system, but the shell is the program that acts at the computer end of that interface, or in other words, who are you writing these commands for. So, how about the Shells of the Bearers of the Shells? We name ourselves the Bearers of the Shells because we own and use multiple computer shells to achieve our goals. In reality, we mostly use Fish, PowerShell, Python (if you consider one), and ZSH. However, we also took the word "shell" differently, which now means "the spherical 🔮 thing we have in our heads". Those spheres are then decorated with symbols commonly found in computer shells: (>_ ) from DOS and Windows, ($_ ) from Unix and lookalikes (Linux, BSD, etc.), and (#_ ) for Unix that belongs to a special user named root. You'll also see that those symbols act as our faces, because we're not just interacting with those computer shells, we are the computer shells! So, in conclusion, we are BOTS because we wear these 🔮 things, and we're the ambassador of computer systems, ready to help people who are using us.
The few odd things found on Hacktoberfest 2022's presents.
Universal.css: The Tailwind CSS that never was.
Are you tired to organize your CSS class names? Check out Universal.css, the only CSS you need. It's available for just under 5MB storage, but it's really worth the size. (Just don't use Tailwind CSS, it's a cheap ripoff of Universal.css).