Friedrich Ewald My Personal Website

Recent Posts


  • Improving Website Accessibility

    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

    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. Google Page Speed score of 99 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

    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

  • Jekyll JSONFeed installed

    I finally followed through with my plan from 2017 to install JSONFeed for this blog. Valid feed validated on JSONFeed.org Although I haven’t seen any breakthrough of this as a technology, I’ll keep it running next to the XML feed and will monitor all requests. This feed is compliant to the standard. To get it to work, I had to adjust my template a little bit and also use jsonify from the liquid template language. Overall, it was easier to get an XML feed to work as JSON is very picky about escaping of double quotes and other special HTML characters. My template for Jekyll is saved as feed.json and looks as follows:

    ---
    layout: null
    ---
    {
        "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
        "title": {{ site.title | jsonify }},
        "description": {{ site.description | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
        "language": "{{ site.language }}",
        "home_page_url": "{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}",
        "feed_url": "{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/feed.json",
        "items": [
            {% for post in site.posts limit:100 %}
            {
                "id": "{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}",
                "url": "{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}",
                "title": {{ post.title | jsonify }},
                "content_html": {{ post.content | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
                "date_published": "{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}"
            }{% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}
            {% endfor %}
        ]
    }

  • Wisdom

    Buy the nicest screwdrivers you can afford.
    Source

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