Posts

If, like me, you’re on the Windows Insider Programme Dev channel and you use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for your web development then you may have noticed some weird dev server behaviour recently.

Behaviour like, starting the dev server, then ...

So, I just found that the SPF record on my Fastmail account for scottspence.com was throwing a verification error. I didn’t really know what the SPF record was for until this point and I had to research why it was failing on Fastmail.

So, I did a pos...

I had this idea whilst working on a SvelteKit project to see if I could use the Marked package in place of MDSveX.

So the idea was that I only need the markdown rendered so I thought why not just load the .md file into a Svelte page and render the co...

I’ve now been using Fastmail for a year now. I was using ProtonMail previously but decided to migrate to Fastmail. I’m going to go into the details of why I switched. This is personal preference and my reasoning behind the switch.

For full disclosure...

Two situations over the last couple of days I’ve needed to do this and I’ve had to look up the code to do it. So I thought I’d write it down here so I can find it again.

This is being left here for me primarily as it’s something I need to do occasion...

Real quick! This was a dumb idea I had when I created the repo for this in 2018 and never got around to doing anything with until yesterday! 😂

Tl;Dr: It’s a list of CSS filters that you can apply to an image to see what effect they have.

For 2023 I’m going to note down my goals for the year. I’ll take a look at this quarterly and update it accordingly.

With the recent changes to SvelteKit which has invalidated a lot of content already out there, I want to make some notes on how to load data in SvelteKit.

First up, if you weren’t aware, SvelteKit completely changed how file based routing is done. Th...

With SvelteKit in the past if you wanted to use a .env file secret that you didn’t want exposed on the client there was some additional config you needed to do.

Vite exposes all variables contained in the .env file prefixed with VITE_ to the client. ...

I’ve been having a play around with Storyblok this evening and want to make some notes on getting set up with it.

With the moving target that is the public beta of SvelteKit there’s a few things that have changed recently which I want to document her...

How to change the highlight color of text on the page? Here’s the situation! I wanted to change the text highlight color to a different colour than the default blue on my site.

To change the default text highlight color in a Tailwind CSS project you ...

I’ve started using TypeScript on every new project I start with Svelte. My buddy Jamie Barton has helped me out with getting set up with the GraphQL Code Generator so that data is typed in the project.

This is a just so you know kind of guide as ther...

I have several components that I use across a couple of my SvelteKit projects. I decided to make them into an npm package so that I’m not maintaining them in several places.

Here I’m going to go through the process I followed to develop the package l...

I’ve had this issue a couple of times now and want to document how to resolve it in most cases.

The latest time this happened to me was with the 22H2 insider preview Windows 11 update.

The Git username and email are the bare minimum needed for when working with Git to commit changes. It’s also one of the first things you do after installing Git.

The username and email are used to set the author of commits. Version control wouldn’t ...

Skip links are internal links that allow you to skip to the main content of the page.

So on this page, if you hit the tab key you’ll see a skip navigation button, something like this:

Secure Shell (SSH) is a secure way to connect with code repository hosts like GitLab, Bitbucket and of course GitHub. While HTTPS connections require a username and password credentials, SSH instead uses a pair of cryptographically generated keys.

Th...

URL shorteners, use them for when you want to share an easy to remember link. You can use a service like Bitly or TinyURL or any of the other ones out there already, or you could make it something you’d want to use and have a bit more of a connection...

In this how-to I’ll be walking through the process of creating a contact form in SvelteKit using Airtable for storing the submissions with no additional dependencies.

I got the inspiration for doing this when a saw a video on YouTube from WebJeda on ...

Do you ever watch a livestream and wonder how the chat is shown? If you have and you’ve searched online you’d probably have found videos detailing how to do this with services like Streamlabs, or Stream Elements. These involve configuring the panel y...

How do you filter a JavaScript object that has duplicate properties? Use reduce! The specific situation I had is a list of objects with duplicate properties. I wanted to filter out the duplicates and return a new object with only the unique propertie...

I’ve now gone through quite a few mechanical keyboards in a relatively short time. The first couple of times were to replace the current faulty one I was using. This time around it was more of a sustainability decision than a replacement.

I’ll do a q...

If you want to fetch data from a GraphQL endpoint, you can use the browser fetch API without the need for any third party tools. You can use the browser fetch API in SvelteKit on both the client and the server.

In this first example I’m using the Sve...

How to set up Tailwind CSS with Svelte, two examples here of adding Tailwind CSS to a new Svelte project.

ℹ️ Please note at the time of writing SvelteKit is not at v1 but this will be the default way to create new Svelte projects when SvelteKit goes t...

In this guide I’ll go through the configuration needed to get set up with Fathom Analytics in a SvelteKit project.

I’ll cover getting set up, tracking goals and creating and using a custom Fathom Domain.

Now that Windows 11 has been released I decided to switch from my Windows 11 insiders build and go over to my Windows 10 partition, reset it and start over on a fresh Windows 11 machine!

In the past getting set up with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WS...

Six months ago today I started a new job as a developer advocate for GraphCMS. This has taken me by surprise as if feels like I’ve only just started still!

Real quick example of how I used Promise.all to fetch data from multiple endpoints in SvelteKit.

This uses the server side fetch that is part of SvelteKit and is destructured into the load function.

I’ve been using Netlify recently to make a project that uses endpoints. Unlike with Vercel where you can use the endpoint to fetch the data dynamically Netlify needs to statically generate the data.

There’s some SvelteKit prerender settings that need...

Bit of preamble before I kick this off, subscribers to my newsletter will know that I’ve been through a couple of platforms now (Zoho, SendGrid, Revue then Substack). I settled on Substack because of the editing experience what I didn’t want to settl...

If you want to rank on Google (and other search engines) you need to be able to tell the world what your site consists of. A sitemap is used by the Googlebot, BingBot, DuckDuckBot and other search engines to tell them what pages are available.

This g...

The indie web is alive and well and there are more and more people taking control and owning their online presence and also how they consume other content. One way to help consumers of your site know that there is new content available is by making y...

Over the last few weeks, I have been getting familiar with Svelte and SvelteKit in particular. Coming from a React background there are many similarities using Svelte and some that are not.

One thing that came up when using Svelte was passing values ...

I made a starter blog with SvelteKit and GraphCMS, I’ve been doing a couple of small projects with it and I really like it!

This will focus mainly on the Svelte and SvelteKit side with not too much emphasis on the GraphCMS side. GraphCMS has a blog s...

I came across this issue today when trying to set up OBS on a new machine where trying to add a display capture and there was no output for the screen.

I found a fix, apparently this only affects laptops and it’s to do with the video card.

I got my new hardware from GraphCMS today and wanted to stream the setup of a Windows PC for web development.

The idea was to do a ‘set up a Windows machine from scratch for web development’ and there would be restarts when installing Windows Subsyst...

Render is pretty neat!

I’m still super early days but I have discovered the render.yml files that is the equivalent to the Amazon CDK (Cloud Development Kit). The Amazon CDK is pretty powerful from what I can glean.

The Gatsby offline plugin is really handy right up until you don’t want it anymore!

I switched my main site over to Toast from Gatsby and hit a bump when it came to removing the old Gatsby site because it used a service worker meant that the new site...

I was tagged into a conversation over on James Q Quick’s Discord about growth over the last year and it wasn’t until I sat down to write about it that I realised I’ve done quite a bit over the last 12 months now.

Most of my content is written and sup...

I have always liked using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), I’d routinely trash installs then reinstall them from the Microsoft store and have become quite adept at setting up new instances with everything I need to get back to coding as quickly as ...

When using Tailwind CSS in a Toast project I got a CSS warning semi-colon expected css(css-semicolonexpected) when trying to use the Tailwind @apply directive.

A quick Google gave me a stackoverflow result for using it in Vue but the solution worked ...

In this post I’m detailing how I set up my domain with ProtonMail and Vercel, this is mainly the CLI commands that are needed to get set up with ProtonMail and Vercel.

I’ve decided to give ProtonMail a shot, I have lost faith in Google being a force ...

A sitemap is an important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) because it makes it easier for Google and other search engines to find your site’s pages.

Google ranks web pages not just websites. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and havin...

The Logitech G915 Ten Keyless (TKL) has been a bit difficult to get hold of recently. If the feel of the keys on the G815 are anything to go by then this keyboard was on my wishlist.

I did get one and have been using it for the last week or so now, I...

I’m a bug writing machine, all developers are! We’re only human after all.

Playwright

This isn’t a guide, this is me documenting the how and why for a proof of concept project I worked on.

So, I started playing around with the GitHub GraphQL API endpoint to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a wile now, that’s to make a serverle...

I’ve been using the Windows Terminal now since the summer, it’s great and I now prefer it over Hyper which was my preferred terminal.

Windows Terminal comes with a lot of options for configuration and a load more which I’ve only just discovered after...

I have been having a blast playing around with configuring Fedora 33 in Windows via Windows Subsystem for Linux, I didn’t know you could straight up import a Linux distro and use it.

In this guide I’ll go through the complete setup needed to go from ...

Ok this is a little snippet I’ve got set up to query data from the GitHub GraphQL API.

I use this for getting data to work with in data visualisation tools, I’ve done it a couple of times now with my Gatsby site but now I’m attempting to do it in a s...

Create a Video overlay with React hooks.

I had to create a video overlay for a project I was working on. This example use a portal to render the player with react-player.

For the past couple of weeks now I have been getting familiar with Preact and the Preact CLI.

It’s great, it’s similar to React

As a developer you spend a lot of time in the terminal so it’s important to be happy and as productive as possible whilst you’re in there.

This is why I’m a big fan of the Fish Shell in particular. The Fish Shell is a user friendly shell with really ...

Sooooooo, so, so, so, Zsh is pretty neat, right?

I’ve been a long time fan of the Fish shell, but I recently had to go full on with a Zsh shell and decided to give it a proper go.

Ok, so this is another one of those “let’s use a new CSS-in-JS library on a Gatsby default starter project” post.

In this case it’s Chakra UI, it’s recently gone v1 and I’m keen to use it.

I have delivered this talk several times now but not actually written about it.

Sooooo, let’s talks about the jamstack!

Here it is kids! All I know about Markdown. First! The standard preamble…

Before that though! Some of the possible titles I came up with before writing this:

I recently started monetising my blog, (don’t worry there’s no paywall!) this isn’t a new thing as I originally did something similar with Brave and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) back in 2018 on scottspence.me.

So what is web monetisation? It’s an ...

Yo! It’s that time again!!

This is an opinionated guide on setting up a development environment for web development in widows that will use the requisite tools, Bash, Node, Git, VS Code etc…

I switched from Ubuntu to Manjaro Linux, here’s how it went.

So for a while now I’ve been using Ubuntu, from when my old Asus Transformer Pro decided that it didn’t like running windows anymore.

Unprecedented times, 2020 has been something else, and hopefully something none of us will have to live through again.

I’ve decided to take a few notes on what I’ve been doing in these unprecedented times.

My list of VS Code extensions I use in my daily development workflow.

I’ll detail the package name to search for in the VS Code extensions tab.

Virtual Box Guest Additions can be a bit of a pain to set up sometimes.

My current PC setup for some reason wouldn’t show a VM in the full resolution.

I had a work colleague introduce me to Linaria last week and I’ve used it on a project and I quite like it.

Linaria is like styled-components but different as in there’s no runtime cost and some other gotchas I’ve found along the way.

A curated list of hints and tips for using styled-components.

Breakpoints

This is a collection of some handy snippets and resources I collected which I’m going to be documenting here, it’s probably going to be a mess but it mainly for my reference.

Big thanks to Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan 🙏

Use the same frontmatter block all the time for your blog posts?

I do, so I’ve created a VS Code snippet to pre-populate the block with some default tags and today’s date.

I found an opportunity to improve the npm package for the Victor Mono font I like to use here and in my text editor (much to people horror when they see it)!

It was a simple fix to add font-display: swap; to the css file in the dist package.

I’ve spent a while today trying to bring down the size of this project, I have several posts that are particularly large so I wanted to work out a way to reduce that.

I’m an Ubuntu user and wanted to see if there was a way I could identify the larger...

I recently purged all the cover images from this site to reduce the overall size of the project, plus they don’t really add to the content.

The only real plus for having a cover image was to that I could get the sweet preview cards you get when shari...

Quite a while ago now I was introduced to dependency update tools like Renovate and Greenkeeper, at the time I thought they were awesome, keeping your projects patched and secure so I went and used them in every project I made.

Busy work

In this guide I’m going to go through how to track custom events in a Gatsby site using Fathom analytics.

Preamble

React Advanced London going deep!

Here’s my recollection of my attendance at React Advanced London 2019 supported with videos from the event.

Do you use Google Analytics (GA) for any of your sites?

I’ve used it in the past and it gives quite good information about

Stand back everyone, I’m doing pontification! I’ve had a couple conversations with my new found developer buddies about fitness, more along the lines of gym going and nutrition actually.

One friend in particular Danielle Ormshaw asked why is going to...

I’ve been wanting to go to a JAMstack conf since the first one was scheduled for October 2018. This year when it was announced there would be one in London I was super excited to get the opportunity to go.

The conference was across two days with the ...

This is a dump of all the snippets I have collected over the last 18 months or so, that I’m going to document here so it’s probably going to be a mess but it’s mainly for my reference so 😛

Arrays

In this guide we’re going to cover converting the Gatsby default blog starter to use MDX.

All the cool kids are using Gatsby and MDX in their blogs these days. If you already have a blog that uses Gatsby but want to move onto the new hotness then thi...

Already use WSL with Ubuntu? Want an Upgrade??

This is a guide that will cover upgrading Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) from the current LTS version to the latest ‘normal’ version 18.10.

Hooks ahoy!

Ok, let’s get it on with the new hotness in Reactland, React Hooks! This is a guide covering using the Gatsby custom React hook for StaticQuery which it is now replacing with useStaticQuery.

Over the past couple of weeks now I have set up several development machines at work and have had to also use two git accounts, GitHub and Bitbucket.

To connect to both I use SSH as a preference, I have been using SSH in place of HTTPS for quite some...

From scratch to Create React App on Windows

An opinionated guide on setting up a web development environment on Windows 10

Let’s go through getting styled-components working with the Gatsby default starter.

Let’s set up Gatsby to pull data from GraphCMS.

Let’s use the React Context API to change theme in an app!

This is what it will look like by the end of this post:

I thought I’d set up this blog with some sort of build pipeline, the intention was to have a good Continuous Integration pipeline so that if there were any issues when building the site that I wouldn’t push a broken build. No one wants to see that 😿

We’re going to style the basic create react app with styled-components to look something like this:

This is what it will look like by the end of this post:

How to combine two separate unrelated Git repositories into one with single history timeline.

Just adding a quick note on this…

Speed up your git workflow with git aliases, this is a brief introduction on using aliases 🚀👍

The more you work with Git the more familiar you become with the commands used in your every day workflow for your projects or your team’s projects.

No doubt you have heard of Git or GitHub for source control, but what is source control?

“Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of ...

How to build and deploy a multifunctional Twitter bot!

This is a reference for me and anyone else that’s interested in Twitter bots in JavaScript.

Just some rationalisation of what I’m currently doing.

Recently I have decided that I’m going to improve my current skill set. To do this I’m studying with freeCodeCamp for a full stack developer certification, I’m also trying to learn as much as I c...

Want to get set up with your very own Twitter bot quickly and easily, with this guide you can be set up in under 30 minutes. But first, why should you want to build a Twitter bot?

There are some really useful Twitter bots out there that do some prett...

I know why Linus called it that now!

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you know at least the basics of Git but if like me and you are the only person making changes to your repos then there’s a good chance that you just use git push origin...

Since setting up this blog I haven’t really bothered with Jekyll any more than just forking Barry Clarke’s repo of Jekyll Now and adding these posts as and when the feeling takes me.

So I got to checking out Barry’s blog and his Jekyll Now templates ...

This is basically a rant about the job market, I was laid off back in August, this is a terrible time of year to be looking for work, everyone is on holiday so things are generally pretty slow so when this happened to me I did the same and went on ho...

I’m a published developer! [sort of] Well that was a bit painful, well not actually I mean from the documentation I feel I was a bit mislead.

So for those of you that know what I do for a living I’m primarily an Analyst Developer with a skill set of ...

I have seen the same situation many times now in my career as a VBA Developer about how source code control is managed with VBA projects.

Source control on VBA has long been a bit of a nonsense, there isn’t any really. When I started my first develop...

Ok, I have recently discovered and started doing freeCodeCamp(🔥) which so far I’m really enjoying.

Since being out of work I have had some time to start exploring different programming languages and technologies but I haven’t found any courses that I...