Archive — page 11
Posted on 10 December, 2017
I've spent the last three weeks (amongst other things) updating the LSERSA (London & South East Regional Snowsports Association) website.
The old site (which stretches back to 1998 — I've been running it since 2014) had a massive archive of race results and news articles that we were desperate to 'hide', and (although I gave it a visual refresh when I took it over) was outdated, confusing and not very engaging.
I've had the go-ahead for several months to do a refresh, but it took until late November for me to find the time and energy to work through the issues.
In no particular order, the brief was:
... morePosted on 04 December, 2017
To my surprise, had an email on Friday afternoon asking me about my 7S26 watchface for the Pebble watch. Hadn't realised that Fitbit were still running the Pebble back-end, although now that I think about it they did promise to maintain it through 2017.
If the first link isn't working, it's because (at long last) Fitbit have pulled their support for the Pebble entirely ... which is kind of the point of this post ...
The email pointed out that the 'settings' for my app weren't working any more. As was the standard at the time, I'd written the app to open a remote webpage to handle settings, and at some point in the last 12 months I'd deleted said page!
My first thought was to simply re-provide the page (at a new address) but for some reason it didn't want to work — I had to compile a new version of the app to accommodate the revised address, which meant using a new(er) version of the SDK, and my suspicion is that the SDK broke something.
... morePosted on 24 November, 2017
RegExp, Huh, What are they good for, Absolutely nothing, Say it again!
So what's a RegExp?
Regular Expressions (also RegExp, RegEx) are a powerful, but potentially confusing, tool for text-matching and manipulation. Many (most?) programming languages implement some version of regular expression — personally I've used them mainly in Javascript and Python, and until recently avoided them like the plague.
If you've ever come across regular expressions and wondered "what the hell are these things and how do they work", the following list may be of some use to you:
- Introduction to Regular Expressions by David Mertz — a short (text) introduction
- RegEx One — an interactive tutorial for beginners
- Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl — this is the gold standard reference book, starting from basics and building to a deep, deep dive (the link provided is to Amazon US, but there are Kindle/PDF versions out there as well)
- Patterns (Mac application) — an extremely useful Mac utility for trying out regular expressions
- Debuggex — a web-app for trying out regular expressions
- BBEdit's Grep manual — don't be fooled by the 'Grep' bit, this is a very useful cheat-sheet for common substitutions
Posted on 27 June, 2017
Update, November 2022 — Heroku have shut down their free dynos so these aren't going to be working; at some point I need to re-host them somewhere else ...
Had a busy month working on FreeCodeCamp projects, creeping towards the finishing line on the Back End Development certificate. Have found the process quite frustrating, but polished up my Meteor and Next.js in the process.
Three full-stack apps arising from all that work:
Enjoy ...
