Hey all! I've been thinking about buying a domain and building a personal website for myself -- at this point just a personal website with links to my socials, my CV, maybe any interesting projects I want to publicize. Maybe someday I'll decide I want to add a blog or build a webapp or something, but for now it'll be something simple and static.

My programming experience is very much not in the frontend side of things (I'm a data scientist and mostly use python day-to-day). I played around with HTML messing with my Tumblr theme enough back in the day that I'm reasonably sure I can build something solidly web 1.0, and I've toyed with stuff like Jekyll in the past. But I was wondering if I could use this as an opportunity to build up some basic skills that I could put on my resume for the future. But I have no idea what's out there that would be useful and quick to learn but wouldn't be massive overkill for a project like this.

I also have no idea how web-hosting works and who to go with if I want to build a personal website myself rather than relying on something like Wix or Wordpress. Most of the easily-Google-able advice is for different use-cases. Advice is either people who want something user-friendly with minimal coding like Wordpress or it's for something properly big and commercial, neither of which is me.

Anyway, I know we've got a lot of suitably tech-y people here on Tildes, so I'm hoping people here have good advice for this sort of use case. Thanks!

Does anyone have any good resources, books or otherwise, in regards do good design for web dev? I'm a self taught full stack dev who just can't really make things look "pretty". They are functional, but..that's about it. I know CSS, but maybe I just don't have an eye for it?

Any suggestions would be great, thanks.

I'm working on a small and simple comment hosting platform in PHP (SQLITE database) to host comments for my static blog https://prahladyeri.github.io/. No login, sign-ups or third party OAuth, just plain old Wordpress.org style commenting system.

I have come up with the following DB schema so far to store the comments (comments table) and enable the administrator's dashboard authentication (users table). Can this be improved further?

-- init.sql

drop table if exists comments;
drop table if exists posts;
drop table if exists users;

create table comments (
	id integer primary key,
	reply_to_id integer references comments (id),
	post_id integer references posts (id),
	message text,
	name text,
	email text,
	website text,
	ip text, -- $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
	notify text default 'n',
	status text default 'Approved', -- Approved/Spam
	created_at datetime default (datetime(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 'localtime')),
	modified_at datetime default (datetime(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 'localtime'))
);

create table posts (
	id integer primary key,
	user_id integer references users (id),
	uri text -- /blog/2024/05/some-slug.html
);

create table users (
	id integer primary key,
	username text not null,
	password text not null,
	email text, -- can be null
	name text not null,
	website text, -- comments will be posted to this site
	role text not null, -- Admin/Staff
	created_at datetime default (datetime(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 'localtime')),
	modified_at datetime default (datetime(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, 'localtime')),
	unique (username),
	unique (email)
);

-- create default data
-- create a default admin user who handles to dashboard
insert into users(username,password, name, role, website)
values("admin", "admin108", 'Admin', 'Admin', 'https://example.com/');

I'm a freelance coder who builds small-medium apps and my front-end stack primarily consists of Bootstrap+jquery. This combo has never let me down until now even with all kinds of features, functionality and complexity thrown at it. I've built dashboards with line charts, puzzles and MCQs, grids and tabular components to edit data, etc. and it was all very seamless.

But when I keep hearing the discussions here and on other places in social media, they make me feel like I'm stuck in a very different century! There is no doubt that React is a well-known, popular and robust piece of software but one thing that dissuades me from getting into it is the whole monstrous npm system of components around it. It seems to be quite integrated with node when it comes to some react components like next, nuxt or whatever. Is it not possible to just like include react through CDN with link or script tags and still make good use of it?

More specifically, I want to know what can I hope to achieve if I migrate from jquery to react? I'm quite tied to the jquery way of doing things right from DOM manipulation to event handling to things like cloning and reusing HTML components in <div> blocks. Is there any established guide or path for folks like us to migrate from jquery and react? And to begin with, is this a good idea even?

Consider the following simple jquery event handler code I've been using since ages:

$("body").on("click", ".dome .btn", function() {
	console.log(".dome .btn onclick::");
	console.log($(this));
});

The this object here returns the button element in question which is the proper way. But today, I decided to use arrow function just to upgrade myself with the modern times:

$("body").on("click", ".dome .btn", () => {
	console.log(".dome .btn onclick::");
	console.log($(this));
});

But in this case, the this object won't return the button element. It will return the window object instead which is the parent of all parents! What kind of atrocious quirk is this? Few days ago, someone on the /r/webdev subreddit told me that arrow function is just a modern way of writing the old function(){} syntax.

I understand PHP has had many criticisms in the past but I'm not sure the existence of dynamic properties of instantiated objects was ever one of them. In fact, dynamic properties are pretty much the hallmark of most interpreted or dynamic programming languages. Python allows it all the time and so do many others like Ruby, Perl, etc.

I don't know what PHP developers achieved by removing dynamic properties feature from the language but one thing that resulted out of this is that many applications based on widely used veteran PHP frameworks (such as CodeIgniter and CakePHP) came to a halt all of a sudden due to an error like this after upgrading to PHP 8:

A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: 8192
Message: Creation of dynamic property CI_URI::$config is deprecated
Filename: core/URI.php
Line Number: 102
Backtrace:
File: C:\xampp\htdocs\inv_perpus\index.php Line: 288 Function: require_once

The influence of Corporate IT in various open source foundations is pretty well known and also well known is the extent to which corporate greed goes to achieve its interests and objectives across the world. The only way to assuage this uncomfortable thought (at least in this particular case) is to ask if there was any technical merit at all in removing dynamic properties feature from a dynamic programming language?

I for one couldn't find any such merit here.

I've been looking around online at compatibility for HTML5 browser streaming. It looks like straight up AV1 in a MP4 container is becoming absolutely fine for browser playback on devices.

Is anyone using this on webpages yet? The sooner we move to AV1, the sooner we can have high quality video stored at smaller file sizes, which is a massive bonus.

Right now my company video hosting is purely in MP4 with H264, moov atom to the front as per the requirement, and it plays back on everything with no fallback in a straight HTML5 video container. What's the chance of switching to AV1 and not having to worry about the fallback for the most part?

Edit: I should have used a better title. I used FFMpeg for MP4 and AV1 creation/encoding. This is more about HTML5 video container code and direct AV1 file playback.

I recently ran across Modular Forms, which is a new and rather obscure JavaScript library for doing form validation that claims good support for TypeScript (type safety) and low download size. It has variants for a few frameworks like React and Preact.

I’m wondering what else people use? I ended up writing my own Preact hooks to help out, with the actual validation done using Zod.

I’ve been looking for a good system for my friends and I to share TTRPG character sheets (primarily DnD) with one another.

We’re not interested in a full-digital VTT, but the ecosystem is pretty fragmented for charsheet-only apps (many immature and abandoned projects). Self-hosted webapp makes the most sense for our needs, but I’m open to suggestions for some other sync method that’s not PDF-based.

This seems like a viable candidate:

https://github.com/Orcpub/orcpub

…but I’d love to hear better options if anyone’s found em.

Granted that it's highly subjective and opinionated, but what this author James Anderson states in this StackOverflow post very much resembles the voices of many like myself who are trying to switch from interpreted/dynamic languages to static and compiled ones like Java/C#. How do Java programmers tackle or respond to this stance?

Hi everyone — I am trying to get a job in web development after a decade in a mostly unrelated field.

I am looking for ideas and tips to create a portfolio to send with applications. All of the websites I worked on ages ago have been taken offline or redesigned by someone else. I do have a website I created for my music, but it’s just vanilla HTML. I also have a personal website which is really the only thing I have to show.

I know HTML/CSS quite well, but that’s basically it. I’ve worked with WordPress for years but only just recently began learning enough PHP to do anything custom. I don’t really know Javascript much at all.

I have quite a few paid courses through Udemy for all these different areas but even as I have completed them, I don’t feel confident in knowledge of the different languages. These courses nearly always come with projects that the students create with the instructor. Should I use these as part of my portfolio? For some reason I never felt right doing that, since I didn’t build it myself.

So I guess I’m curious (if any of you are web developers) if you have suggestions for how to fill out a portfolio without any previous work examples.

Side note: I wasn’t sure how to word the title or my question particularly well so please edit it more clearly, Those Who Can Edit.

edit: thank you to everyone who took the time to reply to this. it’s all been very helpful and i appreciate everyone’s input immensely!

When I visit Youtube, their algorithms somehow always manage to come up with the most provocative and mind aggravating political videos and force me to watch them! I go there to do something else and then it takes an entirely different direction.

I've decided to switch to listening to podcasts for a change, do you know any good one, especially in the areas of Web Development, Engineering Stories, Desktop Development, Windows/Linux, etc.?

I have a little web app running on Deno Deploy and I want to see how it handles people connecting from multiple regions. There's a BroadcastChannel class that lets you send messages to any servers running in other regions, but to test it, I need to make connections in multiple regions, so there's more than one server running.

What are good ways to test this, either interactively or by writing tests? Maybe use a VPN? What's your favorite?

Hey there! Any web developers/designers out there that have resources on creating websites that are fully accessible? I am getting back into web development after a decade away and want to learn the correct way. Thanks for any tips!

Consider the strange case of this reddit preview page for example:

https://preview.redd.it/uhomipyb8kp71.jpg?width=575&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=b0e044ddd8a83774e0453cb7607ef681444c4c37

If you inspect the primary <img> element on the page, you'll find its src attribute not pointing to any image file but (behold!) that link itself!

Through this mechanism, they've effectively hidden the direct link to that image, isn't it? How is this even possible? Is this a new phenomenon or way in web development?

I use Github and Netlify to run some simple websites for free. It works well. However, I've been thinking of experimenting with a database-backed website for fun and Netlify doesn't have any persistence.

What's a good way to do this that scales to zero when nobody's using it? I want to be able to forget about it entirely for months or years at a time. When someone visits, it should start up and run on demand without costing me $20 a month on standby.

Back in the day, I used Google App Engine for this. I learned a lot of datastore tricks to get around its poor latency, but I'm lazy and don't want to do that anymore. I'm pretty sure I want a SQL database and full text search. Either sqlite or Postgres would do, but I doubt there's a cheap enough way to run Postgres.

Litestream looks interesting and so does LiteFS, except that it's pre-1.0 and I don't know what changes fly.io will make that I have to keep up with. If I used Litestream, I'd have to figure out how to run it and where to store the replication logs.

Edit: one nice-to-have is being able to easily dump the database and run it locally or on another cloud provider. (I don't anticipate it getting so big that it's impractical.)