Posts

New York Times Story Portrait
Jul 17, 2022 · 1 min read
Really clever from the New York Times. You can create your own here.
Improving Search Engine Optimization
Jul 8, 2022 · 3 min read
As the final step in this very small series I tried improving the SEO (search engine optimization) score for my start page. I started out with a good score of 92. As usual, my goal was 100.

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Improving Website Accessibility
Jul 8, 2022 · 2 min read
Continuing from before, I wanted to improve the accessibility on this website as much as possible. The initial Lighthouse run gave me a score of around 82, which is not too bad, but I definitely wanted to improve it.

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Improving Page Speed
Jul 6, 2022 · 5 min read
One important thing for a good user experience is a fast website. Google offers the free tool Page Speed Insights. Running it initially on my website I already have a score of 99, which is pretty good. In the past I already spent a fair amount of time optimizing the bigger problems. I looked at the tips to improve the page speed even further. There are four things that Google considers currently in need of improvement on this page.

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Ruby on Rails nil check
Jul 6, 2022 · 1 min read
Rails provides a great way to check for nil and empty variables in the same call: blank?. This is especially helpful in ERB templates where a variable can be either nil or empty, depending on the object. Without it, the check would look similar to this:
```
<% unless obj.nil? and obj != "" %>
    <%= obj %>
<% end %>
```
This is quite cumbersome and easy to forget. With blank?, this can be simplified to:
```
<% unless obj.blank? %>
    <%= obj %>
<% end %>
```
For the following values blank? returns true and false respectively:
```
"".blank?
=> true

nil.blank?
=> true

"hello".blank?
=> false

5.blank?
=> false

AnyClass.blank?
=> false
```