Blog

I’ve been using Google Web Fonts ever since I started building this blog. It’s an awesome service with a great user interface and it makes it really easy to add fonts to your web site. Of course I had to find something wrong with it. Earlier this week our company released our new web site. On our Yammer page, one of my colleagues posted a link to a WebPageTest result for it and it fared reasonably well. It got an "F" on the "First Byte Time" test, but that test is really finicky and could just as well show an "A" if you retake the test (as I later became aware). This triggered my inner masochist and I just had to run the same test on this blog. The first result was this: Test | Score —-|:–: First Byte Time | A Keep-alive Enabled | A Compress Transfer | A Compress Images | C Cache st…

Uploading files asynchronously with XMLHttpRequest is a neat trick on its own, but what I really wanted was a nice way to upload images from my phone and/or tablet. The problem with this is that technology is evolving quite rapidly these days and my …

Uploading files using HTML forms has always felt a bit off for me. You had to set your encoding to `multipart/form-data` and the synchronous nature of form posts always made it a waiting game when uploading larger files. Then came AJAX and the dawn of "single page applications" and such buzzwords, but file uploads somehow got left behind. Javascript didn’t have the access it needed to send files with the `XMLHttpRequest`. Years passed and along came the File API and XMLHttpRequest Level 2 (it seems to be called that again) with its `upload` attribute, support for byte streams and progress events. Today I’m going to show you how to build an asynchronous file uploader with it. We’ll start with the HTML part: There’s nothing weird going on here; just a regular file selector and a list o…

I’ve been hacking away at the blog again and made a little nifty photo uploader for the admin area. It resizes the image on the client (browser) before uploading it with Ajax which is great because now I can upload directly from my phone without worryi…

Every blog should have a search box. Not because it’s necessary, but because it’s fun to implement. A few weeks ago I ran across a small Javascript library called Lunr.js. It’s basically a small text indexer that can rank search results and it’s writt…

I got tired of the old dark green design. It was too murky and spring is in the air, so I redesigned the site to be lighter and more "spring-y". ` `Inconsolata` is back as the source code font and `Open Sans` makes up the majority of the text on the blog now with the exception of headers which are set in `Racing Sans One`. All-in-all, I’m happier. And hopefully this can trigger my implementation of multiple pictures per post since I need that to report on my robot project progress. Summer is coming and summer means sun, and sun means solar power which in turn means that I need to speed things up if I want this project done before the (OMG spoiler alert!) new baby in the end of July….

Wow, that was kind of exhausting. I’ve completed my rewrite of all my blog posts into Markdown. Somewhere in the middle I found why my inline HTML didn’t work and that made my old posts look almost acceptable, but the syntax highlighted source code di…