Posts

In my continuing effort to consolidate technologies used in my projects I'm changing an existing Rails app to use Webpacker and TailwindCSS, and away from Bootstrap.

These are the steps I took to get TailwindCSSv2 working. Add webpack to Rails 5 covers the whole process, including moving existing JS and CSS files to Webpacker.

Where should I host my side project? It's a question I ask every time I start a new project. I've tried so many different options I have to lookup where each project is hosted.

This is annoying and makes development slow. It takes time to remember where a project is hosted and then remember all the different options and commands for those environments.

Some new tools I've come across that I'm finding useful.

I've run a number of projects on Elastic Beanstalk, generally the whole experience is terrible. Still better than running servers yourself, but so far from Heroku.

All my projects end up with a bunch of .ebextensions files that try to configure the EB server for the application. They work sometimes, and almost alway break with platform upgrades, even minor upgrades.

Hosting a [Lucky Framework] application on AWS Lambda using [Apex Up].

[Buildpacks.io] is bringing buildpacks, like Heroku uses, to anyone. Buildpacks are a better way to build [Docker] images, partly due to caching layers, but also helps build reusable build processes. This is a better intro Turn Your Code into Docker Images with Cloud Native Buildpacks.

Using [Coc] with [Neovim] in ZSH and a ruby version manager, like RVM, or [ASDF].

I've been using Rails JSON Serialized Fields for custom objects stored in Postgresql JSON fields. I found this approach and like it a lot more. It uses ActiveModel::Type::Value to create a custom type mapping for ActiveRecord.

We decided to try Kickstarter for the first product of Stubborn Goods. We reached our goal thanks to our friends and family. This is an overview of what we did and some lessons we learned.

Why Kickstarter?

Stubborn Goods makes packs and bags. Since production requires a minimum quantity order to make sense we thought Kickstarter might be a good way to start.

Besides, I wanted to experience running a Kickstarter project.

Continuing from the earlier post Rails JSON Serialized Fields, this covers how to validate JSON serialized objects from the parent model.

Route285 is a site of Colorado product companies. I have images of logos & products from those sites, but need to download and display them locally, in case an image changes later. Also, since eleventy-img supports resizing and different formats I wanted to get that stuff working too.

I ran into a couple of snags. First ICO isn't supported, that was pretty easy to work around, but I still wanted a local version of the file. The useOriginalImage function handles that. Plus it's helpful for errors and SVG files.

Also, since it's an addNunjucksAsyncShortcode in 11ty, I needed to change my for blocks to asyncEach blocks. That took a while to figure out as it just results in those templates returning nothing.

Sometimes I like storing a set of options for a model as in integer in the DB, but still want a nice interface to use those options in code. This is one approach I've been using.

Wanted to setup Jupyter for Ruby to test out some ML stuff. Here's the setup I used and some issues I ran into.

Here's one approach to adding API authentication to a Rails application that's already setup with Devise and Cancancan. We'll add a Warden strategy to process a Token if it's passed in the request.

The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step road map to building wealth by Nathan Barry clicked with me. It provided a good framework to think about where I'm at and where I'm going. Thank you Nathan!

Below is a summary of points and where I'm at, my journey, and moving forward. Please read his article!

Owning my content and making it easy to post are both important to me and I've been slowly working to do that more. Moving my blog to 11ty was a big step in that direction. Now with webmentions and bridgy it's easier to share content. This post talks about what I've setup to connect my blog to the indieweb and some of the closed networks.

This is some

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[Active Storage] is awesome for uploading images, but handling has_many_attached needs some additional stuff if you want be able to add and remove specific images.

This is how I setup multiple uploads so files can be added and deleted without re-uploading the files.

Making emails look nice is a huge pain! [Foundation Emails] help by giving you short HTML tags that are expanded into HTML for emails and nice classes for styling.

[CommandWP] is getting to a point where I'd like to get some early adopters using it. I'm not sure what a good approach might be. Here's what I'm thinking about.

The push to use webpack with rails is getting too much to resist!

You can setup some good stuff with sprockets, but it's a pain and a lot of it doesn't seem too updated.

So... to get things like good ES6 support, minification, easier script managment with Yarn, and PostCSS support; It's time for webpacker

Example 404 page for an 11ty site.

Multiple file search and replace using VIM and renaming files with the command line.

When I started learning to create webpages the web was fun and crazy and annoying. It was also open and easy to get started.

There are a few trends that are bringing some of that web back. I'm loving it!