After you have created your new Hexo post with hexo new post "My Fancy Post" and spend a couple of minutes/hours/days on writing meaningful text, you publish it by running hexo generate and copying the generated HTML to your server.

Next step would be to inform all the blogs you linked to in your now published post, that you have done just that. You want to send Webmentions.

Good news: you don’t have to write your own solution to scan your article for external URL’s and sending Webmentions to their creators: Remy Sharp has done that already with his service webmention.app. It supports the long existing Pingbacks too and offers several ways to achieve your goal:

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It is cool to publish your thoughts on your own blog under your only domain and not only on big social media platforms, because that way you keep control over your content. But what makes Facebook, Twitter and others “social” is the interaction between the people. Likes, Retweets, Mentions, Replies are the fuel which drives them. But most of the blogging solutions offers only rudimentary interactions, in form of article comments. The comment hurdle is high because interacting on someone else’s site is different from interacting on what is supposed to be your own, such as your Twitter or Facebook feed.

The project IndieWeb and their approach of Webmentions, has the goal to fill this gap. As a W3C recommendation, it defines standards how the social interaction of independent blogging solutions can be technically implemented without the need of manual intervention. Let software do the job…

In this article I will only briefly go into the basics and then show an implementation solution for the SSG Hexo.

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As I am a photo enthusiast I’m always excited to find new tools, to give images a unique look. Today I stumbled over Triangula. Ever seen one of those cool backgrounds, where a picture has been broken up into lots of little triangles?

In trigonometry and elementary geometry, the division of a surface into triangles is called a triangular grid, triangular mesh or triangulation.
Wikipedia

Whoever RH12503 (Ryan H??) is, he did an amazing job on creating this little Go program, including a pleasing UI, do convert images into those equivalents.

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As I started with this blog 2 years ago, I wanted to document the customization of Hexo to my needs in a series of articles. To group these articles I considered using the build-in categories, but I already used them to group articles by the underlying tech stack or area, like ´JavaScript´, ´C#´ or ´Tools´ and I didn’t want to mix it, as the category was also used in the Url of a post.

I was researching another grouping solution for Hexo and stumbled upon hexo-index-anything, a very clever Hexo plugin to generate index pages for almost every FrontMatter variable in a post.

As it was freely available under a MIT license on Github, I forked it in July 2020 and made some bug fixes and drop a pull request to Levi … but he unfortunately never answered my pull or issue requests and has set the status of the project to DEPRECATED.

Ok then … make a successor on your own, fella…

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Todays issue is all about extending your Web Developers toolbox with some useful libraries to provide the best UX to your users or visitors. Tables, Dropdowns, Color Pickers, Footnotes and GDPR dialogs on steroids.

• JSTable
• Luckysheet
• Virtual Select
• LC Select
• Vanilla Colorful
• Duet Date Picker
• Cookie Though
• Full-Screen-Touch-Slider
• Bigfoot
• Number Rollup

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Have you ever been in Scotland during summertime? Wonderful tranquility, great scenery and great photo opportunities at every turn. In 2019 I’ve made some great shots there and I want to share the presets with you, that I have developed for processing the photos from my trip through the Highlands and the Isle of Skye.

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Working with the PowerShell in 2020 means fun, because of the new Windows Terminal (get it from Windows Store). It has more power as the old Powershell Console and it is visually adaptable to your personal taste, by installing the wonderful theming engine oh-my-posh from Jan De Dobbeleer.

To get Oh-My-Posh properly run, there are several steps to do I want to show here in a nutshell…

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I’m collecting interesting One-Page-Tools on the web on a Trello board. To add a new card, I use a simple little script on my Android smartphone, I wrote about here: Add website to Trello card the better way.

On processing the page to store on a card, Trello scrapes the page and takes the <meta> tag og:image out of the HTML to generate an image attachment and take it as cover for the card. This sometimes works, but most of the time it doesn’t, because website owners often don’t pay attention to reasonable <meta> tags.

Because it is easier to find a card with visual support, I create my own screenshots for the cards in a manual, but streamlined, process, I want to show you here.

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Since beginning beginning of time, people are using symbols to make things clear quickly and easily. So do we when developing websites and web apps by using icons. Everybody knows what’s behind a loupe symbol or a hamburger icon.

The way we implement icons have changed in the past. From BMP files to GIF and JPG files, PNG files, to complete or customizable symbol fonts like fontello.com, to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

SVG’s in particular are becoming increasingly popular, because they are nothing more than XML-like code, that can be manipulated via CSS or JS, their digital footprint is unbeatable small and they scale seemlessly.

Dealing with SVG’s is a little bit more difficult than placing a PNG in HTML, because of its complexity, but it is worth learning as much as possible about it. So did I in the last couple of month and I want to share my finds on the web with you in this post.

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This month my discoveries are all about CSS … at least almost. See the stunning solutions developers around the world have created and take them to improve yours. Have fun exploring.

• Charts.css
• AnimXYZ
• Magic Animations
• transition.css
• Make Animated Content Placeholders with HTML and CSS
• Animating Underlines
• New aspect-ratio CSS property
• How to display language-specific quotes in CSS
• Making the DETAILS element look and behave like a modal
• Better Line Breaks for Long URLs

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Developing micro services with Microsoft ASP.NET Core 5.0 Web API is powerful and fun, but the fun stops, if your data are accesses unauthorized. It is absolutely fundamental to have a protection layer, which filters out unwanted data requests.

A common way is to limit the service access by providing API Keys to well known clients. In this post I will show you how to implement such a filter in terms of API keys and IP addresses.

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February and the first sunny days in 2021. What a delight! Have fun, sitting in the sun, discovering my newest finds on the web. This time, all regarding JavaScript…

• github1s: One second to read GitHub code with VS Code
• How to enhance fetch() with the Decorator Pattern
• Ky - Delightful HTTP Requests
• VS Code’s REST Client Plugin is All You Need to Make API Calls
• json-view
• You might not need jQuery
• JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures
• date-fns - Modern JavaScript date utility library
• Parsing Markdown into an Automated Table of Contents
• FakeScroll - lightweight custom-looking scrollbars

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