Friedrich Ewald · My Personal Website

Improving Website Accessibility

Jul 7, 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.

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.

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

Jekyll JSONFeed installed

Jul 5, 2022 · 2 min read

I finally followed through with my plan from 2017 to install JSONFeed for this blog. 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

Jun 26, 2022 · 1 min read

Buy the nicest screwdrivers you can afford.

Source