I figured that more than complaining about the dearth of random and weird websites, I might ought to contribute something. I almost went to MassArt for new media installations. In those days I was a web monkey with a solid design bent and very orthogonal thinking. I still have a smidgeon of the thinking, we'll see what I have left of my design skills, but my tech skills are hopeless. Back then my tools were freehand, dreamweaver, bbedit, photoshop, flash, Perl, Solaris, mySQL. My last website was done with rudimentary css.

I would like to get right to the design and expression phase, I don't have an inclination to dive into coding. I also don't want to worry about security. I'll throw a few bucks down.

I'm still comfortable in photoshop, but would like a more fun tool. I cannot stand illustrator, and would love to have a vigorous chat with the folks at Adobe who chose to promote it and shelve freehand. Better yet, an even more vigorous chat with the moron at the FTC who approved Adobe's buyout of macromedia. You can bet that will be on the website. Is there any equivalent to freehand? I saw the post about a free, online illustration tool that came through recently, that might be a smidge rudimentary. What about dreamweaver? And how to publish? I don't care to learn about content management, scripting, databases, etc. if I can avoid it.

Bonus if there are AI tools to help.

Yesterday, Adsense support sent an email to their users regarding their upcoming policy changes. This primarily affects how subdomains are monetized. Going forward, your subdomains inside the primary domains in the "Sites" section (www, etc.) won't be allowed, any existing ones will be removed and their rules will be merged with the primary domain (such as example.com).

Furthermore, what constitutes a "Site" will also change henceforth. You can only add a primary domain (such as example.com) and the subdomains which are listed on the public suffix list (such as github.io, blogspot.com, etc.). Thus, your own subdomains (such as xyz.example.com or www.example.com) won't be allowed in Adsense.

I don't know what they will achieve by doing this considering they already vet and audit each site before approving them for adsense? In any case, other alternatives to Adsense exist such as Propeller Ads, CJ Affiliate, etc. for those affected by this move but I don't know their efficacy.

I'm a full stack dev and my current use of JavaScript language is limited to making the best (read trivial) use of jquery for DOM manipulation in my web apps which primarily use PHP or Python (Flask/Django) as backend.

Now, have you watched that popular thriller movie called Inception which is based on a radical sci-fi concept that an idea or thought can be implanted into someone remotely?

Just like that, I often find myself facing this strange idea that JavaScript is supposed to be just a toy running inside the web browser. No idea where exactly this idea came from! Each time I try to learn JS or think of getting deeper with things like npm, react, etc., this idea just pops up and kinda stops me from doing anything!

Is there any way to get rid of this idea somehow?

Title says it all. Bootstrap+jquery has been my default route and path of least resistance when it comes to web development. Perhaps because I'm coding since a long time and belong to the old school when modern libraries like react weren't yet invented yet?

I had tried to meddle with Angular.js 1.0 back in those days but was soon disillusioned! It was cool and cutting edge but highly opinionated. It tried to do so many things under the hood that I soon quit the effort and the word "Angular" was stigmatized in my mind ever since! I don't know how different today's typescript based Angular is but that stigma or phobia prevents me from even looking at that direction!

React is another cool technology which everyone is talking about and I'm sure it has some merits. But I'm not sure exactly what React brings to my development workflow which jquery doesn't already do. Can you tell me some specific advantages or pros of react over jquery which can motivate me to learn the former and let go of the latter? What should I do?

I'm working on an app idea, it's going to be "API first" in design which means there is a clear separation between the backend and frontend. Former will be accessible through a REST API and the latter can be simple HTML without me having to delve too much on it. The idea is that the end users or clients will write their own front-end interacting with this REST API in future.

Firstly, I want to know where to start. Writing a REST API seems quite easy and simple for me as a backend engineer but I've never implemented a "pure API" app in practice. Do you just validate the headers, do the crunching and return back a JSON response? What all must you take care of here?

Finally, authentication and session handling is something very important here, isn't it? If I make use of session feature in the REST API (like PHP sessions or Django sessions, for eg), authentication will be pretty easier. I don't have to worry about encryption as SSL/TLS would be already doing that for me through the browser. But then what is the downside of this method? Why do so many people use JWT tokens then?

Coming to JWT tokens, is that the only way of encrypting/validating REST APIs, or are there others? My biggest concern here is scaling and performance. I'm willing to implement the most efficient path here, the one that gives the most performance using least resources.

I say that after throwing some caution to air because I understand that every new thing has some initial resistance or pushback due to the "past comfort zone" effect.

But having said that, I feel the aesthetics of the old site was much better than the new one. But then again, I'm from the old-school world who also prefers old reddit to the new one in browsing experience, so my opinion could be biased! But even considering the modern web design, don't you think the black icons on the top right have a somewhat odd look? And the "21 languages" feels a bit verbose, the I10N icon already conveys what that dropdown is about? And finally, that scrollable sidebar on the left looks a tad ugly?

I just hope this is just a beta stage or something of Wikipedia's new version and a better one will evolve soon! But that's just one humble unpopular opinion, me thinks!

As I recall, about 2-3 years ago I had experimented with what is called the npm install xyz through some tutorials, etc. The objective was to improve my tooling or toolchain at least with things like css/js minification, etc. along with Bootstrap customization. The idea was to then move on to other newer learnings like react, etc.

But I was soon disgruntled by the whole process! Neither bootstrap turned out to be an easy horse to tame, and NPM was like this astronomical universe of packages that keep on downloading into your folders! I soon lost taste of the whole thing and kept using my tried and tested stack of PHP scripts and using stock Bootstrap through CDNs.

But today, I want to give it another shot. Has NPM improved than earlier days? What is the best way to go about building a toolchain using it? Are there any useful guides that make the whole process easier to digest?

I happen to host my blog https://prahladyeri.github.io/blog statically, built using Pelican and served on Github Pages. Plebs like us can't afford a backend server infrastructure, so we must rely on external services like Disqus for comment hosting.

So far, Disqus was the only fellow in town who allowed us to host comments on a free plan. Though there were some issues (bloat, adware, etc.), people seemed to be generally happy with it so far.

But now, a new fellow named giscus commenting system has entered the town, it's basically powered by github. Since I already host my blog on github pages, this should be a natural choice for me, right? Many bloggers seem to be migrating to this new system and I might too soon. The downsides however are as follows:

1. It won't allow me to export existing comments from the old disqus system. Understandable to an extent as those exact author usernames may not be on the Github platform?
2. Disqus interface seems to have improved all of a sudden in last few days! There no longer seem to be any ad and even the comment interface seems to be less heavy or cluttered now. It might sound a bit conspiratorial in nature but could this be the result of rising competition in the form of Giscus!

I'm a lazy status-quoist by nature and might well end up retaining disqus if they don't deviate too much from where they are now. But I'll keep an eye out on Giscus too and its progress. What do you guys suggest?

I'm primarily a freelance backend dev and for the first time venturing on full-stack development of a non-trivial web app on my own, hence I needed some guidance.

I've got all the backend stuff in php/mysql covered, I just want to know what's the best way to create a dashboard (with left sidebar) considering various aspects like long-term code maintenance and support, robustness, etc. Looks don't matter that much as it's a CRUD app but obviously, better is more appreciated.

Based on my research until now, AdminLTE seems to be the most popular way of doing it among most devs although a few others like material and coreui also seem to have some street cred.

But another approach I'm considering apart from AdminLTE is to just use pure bootstrap and fiddle up my own sidebar using something like this. That way, I won't be tied to just one Bootstrap version which is used by AdminLTE (v4.6) and troubleshooting will be much easier through google search and StackOverflow. What do you guys think is the right approach?

I’m a solo freelance programmer and want to write an app for internal project management, somewhere I can add projects, milestones, tasks, etc. and track them as I work on them, occasionally remind me of things like take a break, lunch time, etc. and over time I can track on which category I worked how many hours, etc.

I’m actually confused between whether to build this as a Web or Windows Desktop app. I’m considering latter because it can run efficiently on my laptop in the system tray using least memory and resources, web-based on the other hand will force me keep running an apache server too which will be an overhead (unless I host it on Google Cloud or someplace which might be an option?)

The only reason for considering web-based is that eventually I’m planning to make this tool open source and with web-based, many others can find this useful too (including OSX/Linux users). At that point, I may consider expanding its schema to include multi-user connectivity, client login, etc. but that’s going too far at this point!

The idea is that this tool should be useful not just for me but other freelancers, students, etc. who might be in my shoes. From that perspective, what do you think is the right technology to use? Web based or Windows based?

(I’ve extensively worked on C#/WinForms projects before and I’m thinking Visual Studio Express for desktop development. If web-based, it’ll be php/mysql based)

Hey folks.

May someone recommend a good web dev community out there for quality discussions?

Right now I'm using Vue for a project and I'm wrestling with architectural decisions. I'd love for a place where I can discuss different approaches' trade-offs and merits.

Many thanks. :)

Today I was doing some paywall hopping and wondered why there wasn't a 12ft.io bookmarklet to make it a little easier.

So I whipped up this little 5 second bookmarklet for anyone who hasn't bothered to do it themselves yet.

Just make a bookmark with the code snippet below as the URL.

javascript: (() => { window.location.replace("https://12ft.io/" + window.location.href)})();

I tried to make a link here that could be dragged and dropped directly into a bookmark bar, but it's disallowed.

I used to use a random FOSS Python program to manage my blog. The software honestly wasn't the best (partially my own fault for not setting it up super well) and I stopped using it, lost my blog's source code, and haven't updated the blog in a long time because of that. So I'm looking for a static site generator that is simple, well maintained, and no-frills.

So I wanna purchase a domain for my personal website (just a WordPress thing), and I wanna pay for three years in advance (I have my reasons). Which domain sellers are reasonably priced, trustworthy, and more likely to assist a less technical, non-developer user like myself?

Thanks!