alexwlchan
One of my favourite tiny details in this website is my non-breaking spaces. I have code that looks for phrases like “5 cm”, “New York”, or “Objective‑C”, and inserts a non-breaking space/hyphen so they’ll never be split across multiple lines. This is the sort of typographical nicety that would be...
alexwlchan
In my previous post, I explained how I use the FSEvents API to detect changed files on macOS. It’s part of my livereload mechanism for working on this site. I make a change to a source file, that triggers a rebuild of the site, and then the development site automatically refreshes in my web...
alexwlchan
When I’m working on this website, I want a local server with live reload. I want to be able to open the site in my web browser, make changes to the source files, and have my browser automatically refresh the page when the site is updated. I use this whenever I’m working on the site, and I find it...
alexwlchan’s notes
Create a new browser context with a narrow screen, then get document.body.scrollWidth to get the width of the displayed page.One perennial source of bugs on this site is incorrect page widths on mobile devices: something isn’t wrapping or cropping properly, and it forces the whole page to be too...
alexwlchan
This website is a static website, built with a static site generator I wrote myself. When I’m working on the site locally, I want it to build quickly. The site is relatively small, modern computers are overflowing with power, so I don’t want to be waiting. Rendering all the HTML pages takes about...
alexwlchan
Among the other fun news recently, two papers were published that suggest quantum computers capable of breaking classical public-key cryptography algorithms are much closer than previously believed. What was thought to be years away might now be months. I found Filippo Valsorda’s post especially...
alexwlchan
On Sunday evening, I quietly swapped out a key tool that I use to write this site. It’s a big deal for me, but hopefully nobody else noticed. The tool I changed was my static site generator. I write blog posts in text files using Markdown, and then my static site generator converts those text...