Father, husband, developer relations and web standards expert, and cat demo builder.
Raymond is a senior developer evangelist for Adobe. He focuses on document services, JavaScript, and enterprise cat demos.
Hello from the incredibly hot Pacific Northwest. This week I discovered that not every part of the PNW looks like Seattle. I'm in Bend, Oregon, which is incredibly beautiful, but also just as hot as back home. On the flip side, the humidity is basically zero and the mornings and evenings are incredibly nice. My wife and I are up here for a few days as a quick break, and last night we saw a great concert featuring Ratboys, The Head and The Heart, and the Decembrists.
A few weeks back I wrote up the process of building an API that looks for JSON-LD on a web page containing recipe information, parses it, and returns it as pure data. You can (and should before continuing on) find that post here: Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD. When I first shared this, someone (I forget your name, but thank you!) asked the natural follow-up question - can we then render this to HTML or PDF? The answer is, of course, I just had to stop being lazy and build a proper web app. I fired up Glitch and created the following little demo.
I've been a fan of 'random text' for some time. "Random text" is a bit vague, but to me the idea of using code to generate random stories, or even snippets, is fascinating. Back in April, I blogged about how I created short dragon-based stories. It took a generic string:
It's been a few weeks since I blogged about Cat Herder, my latest web game, but over the holiday break I plugged up the last few features missing and decided it was time to "release" it, and by release, I mean set the version number to 1 and see what happens next.
So yesterday I wrote up the process of adding the Squirrelly template language to Eleventy. It was, essentially, five minutes of work due to how well Eleventy supports adding custom languages. After writing it up, publishing it, and running some errands, a really bad and silly idea came to me... what if I added BASIC support to Eleventy?
I'm supposed to be on vacation but writing about Eleventy two days ago has got it fresh on my mind, also, I can't pass up an opportunity to use "squirrelly" in a blog title. I subscribe to three or four different email newsletters related to web development. It's fairly normal to see the same link shared among a few of them. Most recently an example of this was the Squirrelly library. This is, yet another, JavaScript template language and I thought I'd take a look at it in my spare time. Given that Eleventy makes it easy to add other template languages, how long does it take you to add support for it?
A couple of days ago Fedi.Tips, an account that shares Mastodon tips, asked about how non-technical users could make use of their Mastodon archive. Mastodon makes this fairly easy (see this guide for more information), and spurred by that, I actually started work on a simple(ish) client-side application to support that. (You can see it here: https://tootviewer.netlify.app) This post isn't about that, but rather, a look at how you can turn your archive into a web site using Eleventy. This is rather rough and ugly, but I figure it may help others. Here's what I built.
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