The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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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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· Patrick Filler · TIL
TIL: Listen for JavaScript events only once!
A common thing I find myself doing in Javascript is adding some event driven behavior that I only want to happen once. Let’s say I have a big button that starts the process of lowering a certain spy into a pool of certain doom — I don’t want a second button press to awkwardly start him back at the top again!
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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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Lettini is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m Matthew Lettini, but my friends just call me Lettini. You can too, if you want. I’m from the longest island in New York, and have lived in Brooklyn for over a decade. My dog is reeeally trying to get me to move to a place with a yard, though. I’ve been designing things for the web for over 15 years. -
Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re
terriblenot good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.We’d love it if, whenever we make something good, we could just “drop” it and millions of people will instantly show up and fall in love with it. But we’re not Beyoncé. The harsh reality is that most people have never heard of us at Good Enough, and we have to work on the marketing for people to know about our work.
So, how do we tell the world about our wondrous inventions?
Disclaimer: This is not a marketing tutorial. We’re not good at this stuff! But we’re going to learn, and we’re going to try a bunch of things. I thought it would be interesting to share our process and progress. At the very least, we’ll make some hilarious blunders along the way and this should be entertaining. 😅
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Adding Social Preview Images To Our 11ty Blog
TwitterX recently removed headlines and descriptions from link previews, in the name of “esthetics.” Inspired by Steph Ango, while we try not to run our business on the whims of a social media platform, this change did push us into making a change we’ve been meaning to for awhile: adding social preview images for our blog posts.For example, this is now what you’ll see when you share this post:
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How We Made A Good Enough Zine
We made a zine!
The first issue was released in August, and I finished the second issue just last week. Right now, a hundred copies are on their way from the printer to me (update: they've just arrived!). Today I'd like to share the story of how this zine came about.
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· James Adam · TIL
TIL: Tapback Keyboard Shortcuts
If you use Mac, and you use Messages on your Mac, you will probably know that in the not-too-distant past, simple reactions to messages were added: what Apple calls Tapbacks.
These are great for a quick way to say yes (or no, or WTF!?!), but they are a bit of a pain to actually send. You have you right-click on the message, then choose "Tapback...", then click the icon you want, and for a quick reaction, that's not exactly fast.
Well, imagine my delight when I learned today that you can send Tapback reactions using only your keyboard.
To send one in reply to the last message you recieved, just hit Cmd-T and then the numbers 1 to 6 to select the reaction.