A common problem with images, especially if they are user-generated, is that they don’t have the correct aspect ratio for their intended purpose. Also, as we re-flow pages for many different devices, we often want the image to work with different aspect ratios. This is where the CSS object-fit property comes in very useful. There […]
If you have been writing websites or web apps for any length of time, you will almost certainly have implemented some form of lazy-loading using JavaScript. I recently worked on a web app that implemented a search that benefitted to the tune of half-a-gig by deferring the loading of images until those images were actually […]
I was working on a search system that needed to simplify the strings for comparison. It needed to compare the text regardless of special characters (diacritic marks) or casing. The following function breaks the special characters into their component parts, before removing the “special” parts and lower-casing the whole thing. function normalise(term) { // Simplifies […]
One of the consitent truths I have found in every development team I have worked with is that there is more work that can possibly be done. A great deal more. For the forseeable future, this will always be the case. I can come up with an innovative new idea by chance one Sunday afternoon. […]
We’re going to use a simple restaurant set-menu example to explore TypeScript types. By the end of this thought-process, we’re going to be able to require one out of two members that are present on a type. Here’s the scenario. You have a set three-course menu. It looks like this: type SetMenu = { starter: […]
One of the most common issues I see in content-managed websites is the presence of a fully-qualified image address that isn’t secure when the website itself is. When this happens, you’ll need to find all images that aren’t secure and fix them. For example, if you are visiting https://www.example.com and there is an image http://www.example.com/image.png […]
If you are terminating inactive sessions in your ASP.NET MVC application and you add an AJAX polling call, the chances are you’ll make your sessions last forever thanks to the AJAX request bringing down an updated session cookie. This is because the AJAX call will pull down an updated auth cookie and extend your timeout. […]
This is not my idea, though I’ve named it the DITE cycle in opposition to other available alternatives. There are lots of organisations and individuals doing something along these lines and they all give it different names. There are echoes of The Lean Startup, flashes of Spotify’s DIBBs, the velvety touch of Impact Mapping, and […]
If you were a fan of ASP.NET MVC Widgets using Html.RenderAction, you might be a bit stunned that RenderAction is nowhere to be found in .NET Core. Don’t worry, though, because there is a Html.RenderAction equivalent in .NET Core MVC and it’s called View Components. View Component Class The view component class is quite a […]
I had an interesting discussion with a very smart woman I know about tech. In particular, we talked about whether technology is inherently good, or bad. Our conclusion was that tech is only as bad as the non-tech analog for the activity you are engaging in. This is deep stuff, so let’s use some examples […]