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Garmin Simplifies Third-Party Route Syncing with the Connect Courses API
Garmin, a provider of GPS solutions, has announced the release of an all-new Connect Courses API. The new API will allow developers to integrate with Garmin’s GPS devices and directly import course directions. The API has already been implemented in the extremely popular Strava and Komoot applications.
iA Writer Adds Expanded Support for IndieWeb Tools and WordPress Publishing
iA Writer has been delighting users with its minimal writing experience for nearly a decade, racking up more than 3 million downloads. The most recent version 5.5 release for Mac and iOS moves the bar higher for competing writing apps with new support for previewing PDFs and improved support for publishing to self-hosted WordPress sites.
In 2019, MacStories selected iA Writer as App of the Year, describing it as “a case study on how to build a desktop-class iOS/iPadOS app in 2019 that understands the traits of each platform while offering an opinionated, sophisticated design at the same time.” MacStories’ writeup details many reasons why the app continues to find success in 2020.
This week’s update introduces support for Micropub, which allows users to publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools. It also expands the availability of the the IndieAuth system for publishing to WordPress. Users are no longer limited to using Jetpack to authenticate their self-hosted sites.
iA Writer users can now use the more lightweight IndieAuth plugin to publish to their self-hosted sites. The plugin acts as an extension to OAuth, allowing the user’s website to be their own OAuth server. This option is helpful for iA Writer users who were reluctant to install Jetpack just to hook up their accounts for publishing.
Continued support for WordPress publishing comes as no surprise, not just because of its ubiquity on the web, but also because the iA company website and blog rely on WordPress.
iA Writer 5.5 also improves account management for connected services, allowing for the use and reordering of multiple accounts for WordPress, Medium, Ghost and Micropub. Check out the release post for a more detailed look at the Mac and iOS-specific updates in this release.
Deploy Friday: E05 Open Source and Personal Networking for an Amazing Career
A Question and Answer session with guests:
CSS fix for 100vh in mobile WebKit
A surprisingly common response when asking people about things they’d fix about anything in CSS, is to improve the handling of viewport units.
One thing that comes up often is how they relate to scrollbars. For example, if an element is sized to 100vw and stretches edge-to-edge, that’s fine so long as the page doesn’t have a vertical scrollbar. If it does have a vertical scrollbar, then 100vw is too wide, and the presence of that vertical scrollbar triggers a horizontal scrollbar because viewport units don’t have an elegant/optional way of handling that. So you might be hiding overflow on the body when you otherwise wouldn’t need to, for example. (Demo)
Another scenario involves mobile browsers. You might use viewport units to help you position a fixed footer along the bottom of the screen. But then browser chrome might come up (e.g. navigation, keyboard, etc), and it may cover the footer, because the mobile browser doesn’t consider anything changed about the viewport size.
Matt Smith documents this problem:
-webkit-fill-available property is being used rather than viewport units to fix the problem. And a solution of sorts:
body {
min-height: 100vh;
/* mobile viewport bug fix */
min-height: -webkit-fill-available;
}Does this really work? […] I’ve had no problems with any of the tests I’ve run and I’m using this method in production right now. But I did receive a number of responses to my tweet pointing to other possible problems with using this (the effects of rotating devices, Chrome not completely ignoring the property, etc.)
It would be better to get some real cross-browser solution for this someday, but I don’t see any issues using this as an improvement. It’s weird to use a vendor-prefixed property as a progressive enhancement, but hey, the world is weird.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
The post CSS fix for 100vh in mobile WebKit appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Ultrasonic Soundwaves Create Touch-Free Tech Solutions
Social distancing and isolation have become our reality, quickly changing the way we go about our daily routines, from how we shop to how we work. The world is searching for new ways to limit our exposure and stop the spread of COVID-19. I recently saw a photo of an elevator in an apartment block in China.
A Chinese apartment highrise could consist of over 30 floors, so walking isn't an option, but how do you operate a lift without touching the buttons? The property manager stuck a sponge to the wall, and it was stuck with toothpicks for button-pushing. An ingenious DIY hack, but what if there was another way to create contactless connections using technology?
Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips
As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network:
- On Twitter, I made it a thread.
- On Instagram, I made it a series of images.
- On YouTube, I made it a video.
How did each of them “do”? Let’s take a look. But bear in mind… this ain’t scientific. This is just me having a glance at one isolated example to get a feel for things across different social media sites.
The Twitter Thread
The Tweet
A little journey with lists, as a 🧵 thread.
— CSS-Tricks (@css) April 27, 2020
`list-style-position: outside;` is the default for lists, and is a pretty decent default. The best part about it is that both the markers *and* the content are aligned. pic.twitter.com/CkQv1hIt6q
Twitter is probably our largest social media outlet. Despite the fact that I’ve done absolutely nothing with it this year other than auto-tweeting posts from this site (via our Jetpack Integration), those tweets do just about as well as it ever did when I was writing each tweet. These numbers are bound to change, but at the time of writing:
Views
102,501
Followers
~446,000
Retweets
108
Engagements
3,753
Likes
428 (first tweet)
Going off that engagements number, a little bit less than 1% of the followers had anything to do with it. I’d say this was a very average tweet for us, if not on the low side.
The Instagram Post
The Post
Instagram is by far the smallest of our social media outlets, being newer and not something I stay particularly active or consistent on. No auto-posting there just yet.
Followers
~2,800
Likes
308
Reached
2,685
Using Reach, that’s 96% of the followers. That’s pretty incredible compared t 1% of followers on Twitter. Although, on Twitter. I can easily put URLs to tweets and send people places, where my only options on Instagram are “check out the link in my profile” or use a swipe-up thing in an Instagram Story. So, despite the high engagement of Instagram, I’m mostly just getting the satisfaction of teaching something as well as a little brand awareness. It’s much harder for me to get you to directly do something from Instagram.
The YouTube Video
The Video
YouTube is in the middle for us, much bigger than Instagram but not as big as Twitter. YouTube is a little unique in that there can be (and are) advertising directly on the videos and that get’s a “revenue share” from YouTube. That’s very much not driving motivation for using YouTube (I make 50 cents a day, but it is unique compared to the others.
Subscribers
51,300
Likes
116
Views
2,455
Facebook?
We do have a Facebook page but it’s the most neglected of all of them. We auto-post new articles to it, but this experiment didn’t really have a blog post. I published the video to our site, but that doesn’t get auto-posted to Facebook, so the tip never made it there.
I used to feel a little guilty about not taking as much advantage of Facebook as I could, but whenever I look at overall analytics, I’m reminded that all of social media accounts combine for ~2% of traffic to this site. Spending any more time on this stuff is foolish for me, when that time could be spent on content for this site and information architecture for what we already have. And for Facebook specifically, whatever time we have spent there has never seemed to pan out. Just not a hive for developers.
CodePen?
I probably should have factored CodePen into this more, since it’s something of a social network itself with similar metrics. I worked on the examples in CodePen and the whole video was done in CodePen. But in this case, it was more about the journey than the destination. I did ultimately link to a demo at the end of the Twitter thread, but Instagram can’t link to it and I wasn’t as compelled to link to it on YouTube as the video itself to me was the important information.
If I was trying to compare CodePen stats here, I would have created the Pen in a step-by-step educational format so I could deliver the same idea. That actually sounds fun and I should probably still do that!
Winner?
Eh.
The problem is that there isn’t anything particularly useful to measure. What would have been way more interesting is if I had some really important call to action in each one where I’m like trying to sell you something or get you to sign up for something or whatever. I feel like that’s the real world of developer marketing. You gotta do 100 things for someone for free if you want them to do something for you on that 101st time. And on the 101st time, you should probably measure it somehow to see if the effort is worth it.
Here’s the very basic data together though…
| Followers | Engagements | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~446,000 | 3,753 | 0.08% | |
| ~2,800 | 2,685 | 96% | |
| YouTube | ~51,300 | 2,455 | 5% |
One interesting thing is that I find the effort was about equal for all of them. You’d think a video would be hardest, but at least that’s just hit-record-hit-stop and minor editing. The other formats take longer to craft with custom text and graphics.
These would be my takeaways from this limited experiment:
- You need big numbers on Twitter to do much. That’s because the engagement is pretty low. Still, it’s probably our best outlet for getting people to click a link and do something.
- Instagram has amazing engagement, but it’s hard to send anyone anywhere. It’s still no wonder why people use it. You really do reach your audience there. If you had a strong call to action, I bet you could still get people do to it even with the absence of links (since people know how to search for stuff on the web).
- While I mentioned that for this example the effort level was fairly even, in general, YouTube is going to require much higher effort. Video production just isn’t the same as farting out a couple of words or a screenshot. With that, and knowing that you’d need absolutely massive numbers to earn anything directly from YouTube, it’s pretty similar to other social networks in that you need to derive value from it abstractly.
- This was not an idea that “went viral” in any sense. This is just standard-grade engagement, which was good for this experiment. I’m always super surprised at the type of developer tips that go viral. It’s always something I don’t expect, and often something I’m like awwwww we have an article about that too! I’d never bet on or expect anything going viral. Making stuff that your normal audience likes is the ticket.
- Being active is pretty important. Any chart I’ve seen has big peaks when posts go out regularly and valleys when they don’t. Post regularly = riding the peaks.
- None of this compares anywhere close to the real jewel of making things: blogging. Blogging is where you have full control and full benefit. The most important thing social media can do is get people over to your own site.
The post Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
How to Get the Most out of Heroku CI
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are best practices in today's software engineering development process.
Continuous integration (CI) allows developers to automate running test suites and other jobs on each pull request created in their projects. These jobs must pass before merging the code changes into the master branch. This creates confidence in the master version of the code and ensures that one developer doesn't break things for every other developer working out of the same codebase.
Incident Response Requires a New AppSec Model
Incident response found its way into our technological vernacular back in 1988 when the first internet worm — dubbed “The Morris Worm” — was released. In response, the Computer Emergency Response Team/ Coordination Center (CERT/CC) by DARPA was formed.
The goal of this nascent organization was to provide a central hub for communicating and coordinating a response to security incidents. In a nutshell, the goal of incident response is to quickly contain and mitigate an incident, with an impetus to limit damage while reducing recovery time and costs.
Predicting Wine Quality With Several Classification Techniques
Introduction
As the quarantine continues, I’ve picked up a number of hobbies and interests…including WINE. Recently, I’ve acquired a taste for wines, although I don’t really know what makes a good wine. Therefore, I decided to apply some machine learning models to figure out what makes a good quality wine!
OpenStack Ussuri – Intelligent Automation
On May 13th, the OpenStack Foundation released the 21st version of OpenStack, the popular open-source cloud software platform.
Since its initial release ten years ago, when it pioneered the concept and practices of open infrastructure, OpenStack has grown and adapted to become the open infrastructure-as-a-service standard and to support newer workload requirements such as AI, ML, IoT, and edge computing.
Basic Frontend Dev Environment Setup
In this post, I will share with you a very basic development environment setup which is very useful if you just quickly want to evaluate some functionality. At the same time, can act as a good foundation and can be extended once you are done with the initial testing.
Angular and React are nowadays the default choice for frontend development, but for simple POC and validation purposes, we don't have to use those; this way, we can avoid complexity.
GitHub Satellite 2020: Gone Remote, but Not Forgotten
Like so many events this year, GitHub's annual state of the union and feature announcement event went online. However, as I typically watch the keynotes from a satellite meetup in Berlin anyway, it wasn't that different for me this year. As this period of online-first events progresses, organizers and presenters are finding new ways to make the format work, and Satellite was no different. It kicked off with a live-coded DJ set from Sam Aaron, followed by a slightly awkward staged entrance from CEO Nat Friedman where he pretended to be eating his breakfast and to have forgotten about the keynote. Still, humor helps us through these dark times, and it wasn't too awkward.
Anyway, on to the announcements; there were a lot, and a handful were significant.
Best Performance Practices for Hibernate 5 and Spring Boot 2 (Part 4)
Gutenberg 8.1 Includes Block Copying, Testimonials Pattern, and Patterns UI Update
On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team released version 8.1.0 of the plugin. The update includes a new block-copying feature, block pattern search, testimonials pattern, and API changes. The new version does not add a lot of major user-facing changes but improves the experience overall.
The update included two dozen bug fixes and nearly as many enhancements. This release feels more like a solid update that addresses many minor items and nit-picks, such as the addition of black and white colors for the default color palette. The ability to paste a document into the post title input, which gets transformed into proper blocks, works great too.
One nice improvement is the ability to transform the HTML block to the Code block and vice versa. File this one under why has this not already been possible?
If you are following along with the Gutenberg plugin, there are some definite improvements to look forward to in this release, particularly around the block patterns feature.
Copy Blocks with Ease
Admittedly, this is quickly becoming one of my favorite features of Gutenberg 8.1. The editor toolbar now has a copy button, which allows end-users to copy one or more blocks at the click of a button. It is tucked under the “more rich text controls” dropdown menu.
To use the new copy feature, simply select the block or blocks you want to copy. Then, click the copy button. From that point, the block can be pasted back into the editor.
For theme authors, plugin developers, or anyone who wants to share the code for a block, copying a block also produces the HTML that can be pasted into a text editor. No more switching to the code view of the editor and hunting down the HTML you want to copy. For example, the pullquote copied from the post in the above screenshot produced the following HTML when pasting into my text editor:
<!-- wp:pullquote {"align":"wide"} -->
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignwide"><blockquote><p><span class="rtex-highlighter-0">What has the Duke of Devonshire? The only great instance that I have ever known of the enjoyment of wealth was, that of Jamaica Dawkins...</span></p></blockquote></figure>
<!-- /wp:pullquote -->This should make it easy for developers to copy the code of their custom block patterns.
Testimonials Pattern
The team added to its growing collection of block patterns with the addition of the Testimonials pattern. The new pattern brings the library to eight in total. It is unclear which patterns will launch when the feature lands in WordPress core. It is still under heavy development and is experimental.
The Testimonials pattern is one of the more complex patterns the team has introduced. It is a mix of groups, columns, images, and paragraphs. At points, the blocks are six levels deep.
Overall, it worked well among the various themes I tested it against with custom block styles. Visually, it is not inspiring, at least in comparison to what a good designer can do with a testimonials section, but it is a solid stepping stone on the way to more interesting layouts.
Inserter UI Adds Search and Titles
Crossing off two out of three big wish list items from my Gutenberg 8.0 post, the team added search functionality and reintroduced the pattern titles below each pattern in the inserter. These are major improvements. The only item left on my list is for the team to introduce a categorization system for patterns.
The search box switches from searching for blocks to patterns once clicking on the patterns tab. The one issue is the search label and placeholder reads “Search for a block” in both instances. Instead, it should read “Search for a pattern” when searching patterns.
With my wish list nearly fulfilled for block patterns, I have one more item to add. I would like to see the team introduce slash commands to insert patterns. Typing /testimonials should provide users the option to insert the new Testimonials pattern without clicking the inserter button.
Developers: Block Patterns API Changes
The Block Patterns API methods of registering and unregistering patterns have changed. In previous versions, developers used the register_pattern() and unregister_pattern() functions. These have been deprecated. Beginning with 8.1.0, developers should update their code to use the register_block_pattern() and unregister_block_pattern() functions.
This API change is welcome. It is needed for clarity. However, this sort of API change, even on an experimental feature, is one of the many things that frustrates developers who are attempting to keep up with the project. It is especially frustrating when the discussion was originally opened when the feature was first merged. Naming things is hard. It is one of the hardest things to do in programming, but good naming schemes can also be the difference between great software and poor software. There should be more careful thought and thorough explanations when these issues pop up in tickets.
GitOps for Kubernetes
Cloud-native applications are dominating the market with their improved performance and high efficiency. While there are more resources to support cloud-native applications running as microservices, managing complex cloud architecture is still a challenge. The more microservices you run, the more tasks you will have to deal with in order to keep the cloud environment healthy and running smoothly.
Automation becomes an obvious solution to the problem. Kubernetes, in particular, is now supported by new approaches like Infrastructure as Code and a wealth of automation tools. Still, the CI/CD cycle of today demands more robust and Agile architecture. This is where GitOps for Kubernetes comes in handy.
The Role of Continuous Testing for Effective DevOps
Your customers are the true market makers. They continuously contribute to reshaping your industry and influencing the competitive environment.
Your success highly depends on your time-to-market and how well you respond to your customer's demands. Employing DevOps can enable you to speed up your product delivery and improve the overall customer experience — so you can stay ahead of your competition.
Replicating Bitbucket Pipelines on Your Laptop for Local Debugging
Bitbucket Pipelines is one of my favorite CI/CD tools, and I use it pretty heavily daily. Given the full range of use cases available for Pipelines, I have to frequently diagnose and debug new issues, and this process of debugging starts with being able to replicate the problems in my local environment quickly.
I’m going to walk you through the process of replicating a serverless deployment locally. For this exercise, I’ll use this serverless deployment as a reference.