A brief history of what's been going on in the Astro docs.

2022-04-06

aFuzzyBear and I have started a community, build-in-public project where we take my React-in-Astro sBird app and recreate all the same functionality using XElement, natively in Astro! The first video is now up on YouTube.

2022-03-07

Have you ever been reading documentation for an open source project and found a typo, or an out-of-date code example? If there's an "edit this page on GitHub" link, then you're only a few clicks away from contributing to Open Source and helping out a project!

2022-02-10

After getting a Codepen Sandpack (embedded code playground) to work in an Astro page as an imported React component, my next task was to get this component rendered to a Markdown page, so it can be used in a blog post.

2022-01-30

An exciting contribution by a community member has us all drafting new posts...

2022-01-26

This is a screencast and transcript of refactoring one of the basic Astro examples to create an initial BaseLayout component.

2022-01-20

Now that I'm on a roll with dynamic routing via getStaticPaths() in Astro, I'm checking the next item off my Astro blog wish list: pages to display blog posts by tag.

2022-01-12

One of the reasons I had delayed setting up an RSS feed for this blog is that Astro is still technically in beta, and many aspects of coding the site are changing right before my eyes! With everything else I was learning, I didn't want to have to re-learn this, too. But, in the spirit of accessible, self-hosted content, I started the new year by sitting down and cranking it out. Here's how I did it...

2022-01-07

I finally did the work to create an RSS feed for this blog. I'll be getting in to how I (eventually!) set this up in Astro, but first, here's a quick description of how I *consume* RSS. (And, convienently, how I'm gonna test that I can successfully see a new post!)

2022-01-05

This is my first Markdown file written in "new" Astro... so let's see some of those components in markdown we've all been waiting for!

2021-11-22

Astro sites allow you to *use* React, but they *aren't* React, themselves. Understanding the differences between React and Astro can help you get started more quickly, so here are some thoughts on how to think like an Astro-naut!

2021-11-12

One of my APIs requires that I make an authenticated call using Headers in a React component, rendered on an Astro page. This was causing me some grief in Gitpod with my not-so-local environment variables. Here's how the Gitpod community solved it for me!

2021-10-31

I make use of APIs for accessing both my eBird and Flickr data, but each of these require authenticated access with a secret key. Here's how I can use environment variables while developing on my Chromebook in Gitpod, and deploying to production in Netlify without a local environment in which to store them!

2021-10-19

Yes, you can write and render your React components in your Astro page. But remember, Astro *isn't* React, and you might be getting error messages when you *totally know* your React component should work. It's not complicated to establish the Astro-React relationship, but you might not be used to doing these things. . .

2021-10-13

One of Astro's selling points has been that you can bring your own mix-and-match components... but I didn't really get the power of that as a *learner* until just now, listening to Fred K. Schott interviewed on devtools.fm

2021-09-30

I am starting to experiment with React unit testing, and since my Astro blog contains React components, I wanted to see what happens when I tried adding React Testing Library to Astro!

2021-09-28

Since interactive CodePen embedded workspaces are sometimes better, and more accessible ways to blog about code, I thought I'd extract the patterns in the HTML and practice making a little Astro component!

2021-09-16

I'd been using a lot of components in my Astro blog, but I realized that they were almost all *React* components, because that's what I know. So, I wanted to try reproducing some functionality by replacing a React component with a corresponding Astro component.

2021-09-09

A misleading error message that might steer you down the wrong path...

2021-09-04

When you code for @jbrains, you get 5-pin bowling coding assignments!

2021-08-25

Exploring the ins and outs of special Markdown characters in Astro

2021-08-12

Using flex-grow to create a "spacer" div to solve the problem of a footer displaying halfway down a page when you don't have enough content to fill the entire height of the screen.

2021-07-31

A comparison of what happened (spoiler alert -- it got weird!) when I tried to import styles/global.css into my layout.astro file.

2021-07-30

An example of React context in Astro, using a currency example

2021-07-18

It just didn't make sense that no online editors were building Gatsby projects, so I decided to dive in.

2021-04-08

I held on with all eight tentacles to Octopress as long as I could! But now that I'm learning JavaScript more seriously, I thought a good project would be a modern blog with some modern technologies. Let's head into the Roaring Twenties with Gatsby(.js) and an interesting JAMstack site builder/maintainer called Stackbit.

2020-07-04

Can't connect to wifi on your Chromebook when you stay at Radisson hotel because of their captive portal? No, it's *not* just a matter of finding a non-SSL page to start your connection like with many other captive portals. Here's what I did to approximate a working wifi connection on my Chromebook at Radisson hotels. Maybe someone from Radisson will see this and upgrade their wifi system!

2018-12-10

Google Photos is great for *storing* your photos. It's even becoming pretty good at *sharing* select photos with select people. But still, the problem for many of us from the Picasa Web Album days is *displaying* our albums publicly.

2018-07-11

Unexpectedly, I've been doing most of my blog post editing directly via a browser while logged into GitLab.com instead of using an Android markdown editor. I wanted to revisit my options, however, so here goes a post composed via MrHyde.

2018-02-05

A quick post to announce a very exciting thing: I have an app, and now you can have it, too! Get IF Timer now, or read more about it first. . .

2017-12-15

I sat down to write a post about setting up my Twitter client on my phone, but this post quickly became about the app I'm using to write this post, instead.

2017-07-12

This is my first attempt to draft and publish a new post entirely on this machine...

2017-07-06

While I was mostly ready to switch from Mac to ChromeOS/Android, the last piece of the puzzle was this Jekyll blog which is generated on my machine, then the static site is uploaded to Heroku. With no means of generating the site locally on a Chromebook or Android device, I had to spend some time figuring out my alternatives. If you can read this, then I am success! And here's what I did...

2017-03-01

Even though Joe and I both have our own Pocket accounts, for the longest time there was no in-app way to notify each other when we found something we think the other person should read. Even though that feature has recently been added, we didn't just want a *notification* that required action. I wanted to directly add to his reading list so that articles would automatically be downloaded for offline reading with no action required on Joe's part. So, I cobbled together my own direct sharing system so that I can simply tag an article in Pocket for Joe, and it will automatically show up right in his Pocket reading list. This is how I did it...

2017-02-05

It's been exactly two months since the day my Desktop Picasa app stopped connecting to my Google account. The secret handshakes no longer worked. The known tricks for appending URLs were useless. Whether I was ready to or not, I had to move on. I'm still trying to recover, but here's more or less how things go now . . .

2016-10-09

"Shared Albums" in Google Photos are great for collaborating. I finally got Joe on board with adding his travel photos directly to my shared albums, and it worked perfectly! So, if you think you'll want this set up where multiple people contribute to the same album, you should probably just create a "new shared album" right off the bat, right? WRONG!

2016-10-04

Well, it finally happened . No more Picasa Web Albums! I've spent a few months trying to come up with a decent Google Photos workflow and Picasa alternative, and here's what I've settled on for now

2016-09-16

I have written before about my most awesome, practically spoiler-proof system on MacOS for reading Blue Jays tweets in "alternate time" as we watch PVR-delay or archived games (and a comparable Android version). But, it's not simply "set it and forget it!" When the Blue Jays sign a new player or I find a new Jays fan to follow on Twitter, new accounts need to be added to this system.

2016-06-09

There are two major criteria I have for a Twitter client, given the way that I use Twitter: keep track (and hold on to a lengthy backlog) of unread tweets; and keep certain tweets out of my main timeline but still accessible to me when I’m ready to go back and read them. (ie Not simply “muted” or “blocked.”) I discovered last year that Tweecha did one very well. Months later, I'm pleased to report that it also does the second very well.

2016-05-25

Today I attempted to create a public photo album gallery page in Google Photos, something PicasaWeb Albums generates automatically for its users but Google Photos does not. Here's what I did:

2016-03-29

I'm perhaps less of a "photographer" and more of a "photo management addict." I may not have great photos, but the ones I have are immaculately organized! Many have asked me about my process, so here's a description of what I do to keep on top of the many photos, from many sources, I accumulate.

2016-03-28

One issue (among many!) that people are having with the transition from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos is how to directly link to a photo from Google Photos.

2016-02-19

The story of "Error 28: no space left on device" means when you're quite certain your external hard drive is large enough to backup your laptop's internal hard drive.

2015-12-04

As I've written before, YoruFukurou (Night Owl) is my indispensable Mac OS X twitter client. It's the only client I've found that supports tweet filtering, not just simply muting of tweets so that tweets I might not to see *now* can still be read at a convenient time *later*. It also happens to be a very good client for someone who likes to keep track of which tweets have or haven't been read, which is useful if you choose to (eventually) read every tweet in your timeline. As long as the application doesn't restart, it can hold tens of thousands of unread tweets, all nicely organized into various tabs. If I wanted to, I could leave Yoru Fukurou running at home on a computer, go out of town for a week, and everything would be there when I got home! This is a tall ask of an Android Twitter client, but as someone who does try to manage unread tweets, I wanted to see how close I could get.

2015-12-01

I've been meaning to write to explain exactly how my super-awesome-spoiler-proof Twitter system works. "So, you mute keywords and hashtags?" Oh, if only it were that simple!

2015-04-13