Category Archives: Original Content

Test an IMAP connection with cURL

Today I needed to debug an IMAP problem. I got reports from a user (whose password I recently rotated) that Outlook wouldn’t connect, even though they entered the correct new password. The connection to the server was made, but the login attempt always failed. As I didn’t want to add the account to my local […]

Squash all Git commits with git squash-all

Freek just shared his workflow to squash all git commits into one single commit — Handy for when you’re pushing a first public release of a project. His process involves removing the .git folder and starting off fresh again with a git init. Wondering if there are handier/shorter ways to achieve this I set off […]

Smooth Scrolling Sticky ScrollSpy Navigation

Yesterday evening I was working on some documentation pages. The page layout is quite classic, as it consists of a content pane on the left and a sidebar navigation on the right. Looking for a way to make the page less dull I decided to add a few small things to it: Smooth Scrolling when […]

Chrome vs. WordPress: All Text Showing as Glyphs / Symbols 🤯

Ever since mid december I’ve had a few reports of people seeing my blog here in unreadable text. Instead of seeing a nice serif font, they got presented with some wingdings-like symbols for all the text when visiting through Chrome on macOS. Very strange, as I myself am also using Chrome for my main browsing. […]

Firefox 72: Individual CSS Transform Properties

New in Firefox 72 is the ability to individually define CSS Transform Properties. You can now separately define scale, rotate, and translate CSS properties, instead of having to chuff them all into one single transform property. The translate, rotate, and scale properties allow authors to specify simple transforms independently, in a way that maps to […]

ESNext: Replace all occurrences of a piece of text in a string with String.prototype.replaceAll

An ECMAScript Language feature that’s currently in Stage-3 is String.prototype.replaceAll, a handy way to replace all instances of a piece of text in a string. Stage-3? 💁‍♂️ To develop new ECMAScript language features, TC39 uses a 5 stage process, ranging from Stage-0 to Stage-4. Stage-3 is the Candidate Stage where the feature is considered complete […]

Have a web page prevent your screen/computer from dimming/sleeping with the Wake Lock API

On some sites you don’t want the screen to dim (and eventually turn off) when left idle. Think of a run-tracking app, a puzzle game that takes device motion input, a recipe site for example: you’d want to keep the screen awake even if there is no touch input. This is where the Wake Lock […]

Avoid Guzzle 6.5.0 (aka How to fix “Use of undefined constant INTL_IDNA_VARIANT_UTS46” on CentOS 6)

There’s a bug in Guzzle 6.5.0 in which it does not play nice with systems that have an older ICU library (which PHP’s Intl extension uses). CentOS 6 for example ships with a very old ICU version, without any (offical) means of updating it. The bug should be fixed in (the unreleased) Guzzle 6.5.1. It […]

How the CSS :is() selector will simplify things

One of the selectors in CSS Level 4 is :is(). It is the successor to :any() and :matches() (which are supplanted by :is()): The :is() CSS pseudo-class function takes a selector list as its argument, and selects any element that can be selected by one of the selectors in that list. This is useful for […]