While reading the Chris Coyier’s post Application-Specific Links the other day, I realized what has been bugging me for a long time now: a proper solution for openening a certain URL in a modern Web App.

Since the beginning of the digital age (feels like that), we have files associated to a certain application, installed on our machine, regardless if its running Windows, iOS, OS/2 or whatever. We have learned that well and no one questions it … but … the IT world keeps on turning and today we are not only talking about files, but about links.

Many modern applications are written with Web technologies, thanks to cross platform frameworks like Electron. Some of them are real apps for working on things, like the famous editor Visual Studio Code, and some are mirroring their online services in a desktop app only, like Slack or Notion. However, the latter have the problem how to deal with links to their online services. When a user is sent a link and has become accustomed to using the desktop app, it won’t open in the app as he clicks on it, but in his default browser. The question is, how to associate not only files, but links with certain desktop apps?

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Hexo is a great SSG platform for blogging. Just write your Markdown beneath some Frontmatter meta data, run hexo generate and publish the results to a web server.

But at some point you may want to process different data from internal or external sources and integrate it into your blog. Hexo doesn’t support this out of the box, but has a powerful feature called Generator, which helps you to achieve your goal. The following is a sample and pattern of how to implement this.

The starting point of my example is the requirement to display several elements of the same type on a dynamic page, but you can of course adapt the example according to your needs.

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Beginning of the month, Amelia Wattenberger of GitHub Next has published a project to create a SVG visualization of a GitHub repository’s codebase.

On the project page Visualizing a codebase, she talks about the advantages of code vizualization in terms of a better overview and comparability of code … and I loved it at first sight, because I’m an absolute visual person.

But her attempt was not only to show us what’s possible (static SVG files and even interactive apps for code browsing, filtering and comparing), but give us the possibility to create our own codebase diagrams as SVG automatically, whenever we commit our code, by running a GitHub Action, she and her team has developed … the Repo Vizualizer

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GitHub has released the long awaited solution für code editing in the web today, or more precisely, the two new solutions: CodeSpaces and github.dev.

As Brigit Murtaugh and Allison Weins pointed out in their presentation at the live stream on Youtube (VS Code anywhere: GitHub Codespaces and github.dev), both solutions are based on the codebase of Visual Studio Code, but have different approaches and target groups.

Where Codespaces is an online editor with computing capabilities (realized by running a VM in the backend) and is only available für paid plans, github.dev is a free online editor to change files in your GitHub repo as you do it in your local VSCode, but without running and debugging capabilities.

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This months discoveries it’s all about CSS tutorials. You will find some of the best articles of profound CSS masters like Ahmad Shadeed or Josh Comeau. All tips are vital to bring your CSS to the next level. Happy learning…

• CSS Variables 101
• Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
• A Deep Dive Into CSS Grid minmax()
• Create Diagonal Layouts Like It's 2020
• Using calc to figure out optimal line-height
• Drop-Shadow: The Underrated CSS Filter
• A Guide to the Responsive Images Syntax in HTML
• Centering in CSS
• How to trigger a CSS animation on scroll
• CSS Scroll Snap

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Writing an SPA (Single Page Application) in JavaScript/CSS always means to keep an eye on small files to deliver. Especially when utilizing a bunch of libraries and frameworks, bundling is some sort of a must. The offer on bundlers and task runners is large on the web: WebPack, Snowpack, Browserify, Parcel, Grunt, Gulp and “DingDong” (just replace with the hotest new shit available).

But, it is not always necessary to replace your complete building pipeline, when the new “DingDong” is hyped in the media. Brave old tools like Gulp are doing their job pretty well … and you are able to integrate some more modern approaches on bundling JS, for example.

I couple of months ago, while working on a private project, I became attentive to Rollup.js, a next-generation JavaScript module bundler from Rich Harris, the author of Svelte. Rollup uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript and supports Tree-Shaking, which means that it analyzes all your ES6 imports statements and bundles only the code which is used. Pretty cool … but … it is a JavaScript bundler only and there are no plugins for Gulp, my favourite task runner.

In this article I will show you, how to integrate Rollup in your Gulp bundling pipeline.

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At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about showing a shadow on an image with the image itself instead of using box-shadow, to make the image appear glass-like.

Nice trick, but it would be much easier to have a little script, that does this automatically for all images on a page. In this post I will show you how to achieve this.

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From day one of this blog I wanted to combine two of my passions: tech stuff and photography. All these photos I have shot myself in recent years and now they are representing my thoughts & findings about digital technology. I wrote about my approach to provide these images in my post Automatic Header Images in Hexo.

When I share one of my posts on social media I provide the appropriate image as a visual anchor to my writing. The technique behind this are the meta tags in the HTML of my posts:

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<!-- Schema.org for Google -->
<meta itemprop="image" content="https://kiko.io/photos/normal/DSC_6776.jpg">

<!-- Open Graph -->
<meta property="og:image" content="https://kiko.io/photos/normal/DSC_6776.jpg">

<!-- Twitter -->
<meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta property="twitter:image" content="https://kiko.io/photos/normal/DSC_6776.jpg">

There are several meta tags for different purposes regarding images. For more information see the links at the end of this post. To make a long story short: The sum of these approaches ensures that when an article is posted, the corresponding image is also displayed in the social media post.

But … it’s only the image, without a visual reference to the post itself. In this article I want to show you how to combine the photo with some meta information of the post automatically, to get a Social Media Image.

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Todays issue of Discoveries is all about images. Show them, manipulate them, get information about them, protect them, use them and create them with JavaScript. Have fun trying out one of these cool solutions.

• PhotoSwipe
• lightGallery
• Pica
• Resemble.js
• medium-zoom
• LC-Mouse-Drag
• ProtectImage.js
• Tinygraphs
• Dynamic Social Sharing Images
• Automatic Social Share Images

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A while ago I needed some functionality regarding database access in one of my spare time projects and I decided to use a library from NPM. Typed npm install and the hell was breaking loose … 186 direct dependencies and nearly 200K of files were flooding my harddrive!

The mental basis of IT is lazyness, which means that we produce software to make our and others life easier. This also applies to the building process. Don’t reinvent the wheel, but reuse the work of other developers. But … we have to recognize the limits and prevent to fall into the dependency hell.

To get a better overview over dependencies, regarding NPM and other repositories, some Google engineers have published a project called Open Source Insights a couple of days ago.

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Todays Discoveries it’s all about my favourite programming language JavaScript. Some tiny tips and tricks alongside with a deep dive into ‘console’ and some helful UI libraries. Have fun…

• Beyond Console.log()
• DOMGuard - Stop scammers from the manipulating DOM
• Handling User Permissions in JavaScript
• html-chain - Make html by chaining javascript functions
• Accessible Autocomplete
• JS DataTable
• MK Charts
• Snabbt.js - Fast animations with Javascript and CSS transforms
• SimplyLazy - Pure JavaScript Image Lazy Loader
• Blury-Loading

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A meaningful interaction has always two directions: sending and receiving. In this part of the post I want to show you how to receive Webmentions from other blogs participating in the IndieWeb.

As Hexo is a SSG it generates static HTML pages. This has the advantage that the pages can be hosted just about anywhere (in my case Github Pages, but also the disadvantage of not having a real backend. Therefore, we need an external service that acts as an Webmention endpoint, where other people can send their webmentions.

Aaron Parecki, co-founder of the IndieWeb, has made a service called webmention.io we can use for free. It is able to convert old-fashioned Pingbacks to Webmentions, supports deleting of unwanted mentions, has a Blocklist for blocking domains, Webhooks for real-time processing and last but not least an API to get all your Webmentions per page or per site.

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