Posts by Barry Hess
A Good Enough Engineer
More about Barry:
https://bjhess.com
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Easily Support Gravatars in Rails
We’re building some software where we’d like to display avatars for email contacts even if they aren’t users of our software. While Gravatar is a relic of Web 2.0, we’ve found that there are still a significant number of people who have their email addresses in that system.
Here’s how I streamlined displaying an avatar for an email address if it exists in the Gravatar system.
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How We Built Unique Social Preview Images for Pika
One of the goals of Pika, the happy blogging software that we recently launched, is to help you find your own place on the internet. Along with a nice place on the internet, when you share links to your blog we want them to represent your internet home, which you've likely taken a little time to make just so. Sharing your blog on social networks, text messages, Slack, or wherever should be an experience that makes you smile, and that's why we built custom social preview images for your blog.
But how did we do it?
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Pika: Start Your Happy Blog
Have you thought about starting or restarting a blogging habit? Have you wanted to write on the internet, but at your own place and at your own address rather than on a social network? Have you been overwhelmed by the online writing options that you’ve found? Well, have we got just the thing for you!
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Why We're Writing Blog Software
We’re seven months into our Cosmic Maelstrom and we have started writing blogging software. What the why?!
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Fixing Things
In 2009 I started doing something called "business travel." I bought a piece of dependable luggage: the Travelpro WalkAbout Lite 2 22" Rollaboard Suiter. The reality was that this wasn't proper business travel. First, it'd only be two or three round-trip flights a year. Second, suits were not a thing with which I needed to concern myself. Still, I did my research, was told "look at all of the flight staff – they're using Travelpro," and I spent accordingly.
For some reason I got into my head that expensive meant "buy it for life," but it was just a decently-built suitcase. At any moment it could get slammed to the runway pavement and that would be the end of the suitcase's lifetime for which I had bought the thing.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Rails has_one Nested Attributes Tweaking
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things caught me off guard.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Blocking Password App Autocomplete on Form Fields
I wanted to disable password managers, particularly 1Password, from interacting with a username field in Contact Me. It was pretty simple in the end:
<%= form.text_field :username, "data-lpignore": true, "data-1p-ignore": true %>
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Yes, Facebook Is Terrible, but Also…
I’m not on Facebook. It was eight or ten years ago when I left for good. While there were some good and useful interactions, the algorithm brought me down, I didn’t have a lot of desire to keep up with old acquaintances, and hearing everyone’s political stance was not good for me.
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How We Built Quack (Beta)
We recently launched Quack, a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any Markdown text. This software is completely front-end based, and for me personally it was a bit of a challenging puzzle to implement. Thankfully we have genius hackers like Arun here at Good Enough!
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Why We Built Quack (Beta)
Today we're launching a tiny beta tool called Quack. It is a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any markdown text. Type away in our simple editor. When you're done writing, click Share to grab the link for sending to others. There are no servers in this beta. Everything you write is stored in the URL, so every time you change your writing the URL changes as well.