Stone Chains

Series | Step By Step

Software development is the art of automation … because Developers are lazy. Manual work steps quickly end in writing scripts. But sometimes the effort is not justified or it is simply impossible to automate something, because of OS barriers or other show stoppers. Then it is better to optimize und document the manual steps.

In this series I want to share you some step-by-step instructions of various topics I stumbled upon in the past. My processes shown here are of course highly individual and mainly meant for me, but maybe someone has a hint I haven’t thought of yet or is inspired to set up something similar.


Following 3 posts belong to Step By Step ...

Rainbow Crane
Step By Step

Photo Workflow Re-Thought

To be honest: many of my posts here on kiko.io are written just for me. To internalize things by writing them down and to give my future me the chance to look up something I did in the past. So is this post. Future me: Don’t forget the following!

I while ago I was on a trip, shooting a lot of photographs and on my way back home I had three 32GB SD cards full with great photos. I was working with my old Nikon D7000, which has 2 card slots and I just took them out, when one of the cards was full. Worked fine for several years … but after this trip, one of the cards, full with RAW files and wonderful photos, w-a-s   N-O-T   r-e-a-d-a-b-l-e   a-n-y-m-o-r-e … f***! I saved myself the backup and now had to suffer over my carelessness.

I thought about some fancy and expensive backup solutions for professional photographers, but realized after a while, that I already had the equipment to achieve everything I needed and I could even use it to improve my general workflow.

In this post, I want to show you, what my workflow looks like today and how yours might benefit from my mistake.

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Break Dancer
Step By Step

Adding Screenshots to Trello Cards on Android

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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Direction Airport
Step By Step

Remote Testing and Debugging with Chrome

How to test a local site on a mobile device and debug it locally

Developing a website or web app means, you have installed an editor locally on your computer, writing your code locally and start a tiny, built-in web server for debugging locally in your preferred browser. In most browsers, there are some features to mimic a smartphone, to see if your solution is working on such a device too, but you only get a hint if it’s running properly. Some mobile features like navigator.canShare do not work at all. Better is to see it live on your device.

This article will show you firstly, how to test your local solution on a smartphone and secondly, how to debug it locally, when it runs on the smartphone after releasing.

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