Don't you just love the native share UI on Android and IOS? Well, did you know that you can provide that exact experience to users of your website using the navigator.share web API? You can do so in just a couple of minutes and a few lines of JavaScript! You should be aware that at the time of writing, I'm not aware of any desktop browsers that support this feature, although it is supported by all major mobile web browsers. Because you are accessing a native OS function, there are also a few se

RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is an XML based web feed standard that is commonly used by blog and news sites to supply their most recent posts to third parties. It was initially released on March 15, 1999, a little over 23 years ago at time of writing. Since then, it has had a few revisions & alternatives notabley RSS 2.0 (September 7, 2002) and Atom (December 2005). Most sites that still use RSS, will use Atom. Back in the mid 2000s it wasn't uncommon to see RSS badges pr

If you follow me on social media, you're probably aware of the social image that shows up for any articles I share from this site. It's a giant image of my face. Now I don't know about you but I don't think this is a great image for getting engagement. I wouldn't click it... [tweet 1530986495850446852] This is done by setting a page's OG (Open Graph) Image in the html head of your page. The Open Graph protocol allows you to turn any web page into rich objects for social media sites. In the exa

Like many web developers, I work day to day within the javascript ecosystem. For those who aren't aware, NPM is the primary package manager for javascript developers. While in the early days, it was primarily for NodeJS and backend use (with Bower acting as the frontend equivalent), it is now used consistently across the stack. I use NPM at least 100 times a day; Not just for installing and managing packages but for managing scripts, git hooks and test suites. npm run dev, npm run test and npm r

With Google IO a few days ago, all sorts of new and interesting things got announced. One thing that really struck my imagination was the new Google page transitions functionality for web. I wanted to take a look at the new API and see how difficult it would be to implement in a site like mine. The Google team posted a video explaining the new API, as well as a demo and github repo showing us how it works so I have a nice jumping off point, but to put it simply, the Page Transition API allows d

So I did a little more work on polishing the blog today. It now has author filtering, available from any post by a given author. I also put in some pagination. Obviously the pagination isn't visible just yet but I wanted to get it working before I needed it. The majority of my work was actually around releasing. See, the first blog post was actually added manually to the MongoDB database... db.getCollection("blog").insert({}) For those who don't know, MongoDB is a BSON NoSQL database. This me

If you're browsing this site at the moment, It's likely because you're checking out my CV. You might have noticed that my CV is generated in real time when you access it. It even has a "Generated At" stamp in the footer (pictured below). This blog post is going to go into some of the technical details as to how that works. SvelteKit Endpoint The site is built using SvelteKit, a web app framework built on top of Svelte. SvelteKit allows you to quickly create both API and frontend endpoints bas