Programming

Auto fill settings objects with .config values

Lately I’ve been playing around with some API’s. Most of them need a bunch of settings that I’m storing them in my config files. I found myself doing the same work over and over again: creating a settings class, filling the class with information and using it. So I came up with a way to leverage reflection to fill my setting classes with .config values.

Convert HTML to SVG using CloudConvert and C#

HTML is often easier to generate than SVG. Can it be converted to SVG? I’ve found a cloud service with an API that does a nice job converting various formats: CloudConvert. I ended up implementing a small part of their API to do the conversion.

Whipping WPExplorer’s Blogger Template into shape

I recently switched to WPExplorer’s Bogger Template, because it is simple and focused on the articles. What’s not to love? But there is still a lot to do to whip this template into shape. To help you out, I’ve created this post.

Login Credentials Generator – in JavaScript

Many small applications need to store user credentials, but it’s hard to create a good username/password infrastructure. What if you could just use a small XML file with credentials that don’t actually stores the password, but just a hash and some salt.

For a small cloud project I ended up creating such a solution. This blog explains how to generate the credentials that can be stored in the XML. The aim is to make a solution that works on the client using JavaScript.

Increase WordPress performance on IIS

I noticed that the Time To First Byte (TTFB) of my website was taking way too long. First I thought it should be resolved by caching, but I noticed that it couldn’t be the caching, because TTFB kept being pretty high. After some research I found the culprit: IPv6 with the MySQL driver.

Little life saver: parsing HTML entities

Recently I had the pleasure of building a calculator example exercise. Begin a good programmer I used the some HTML entities as values on the buttons: ×, ÷ and ± as values. It turned out to be quite difficult to parse them with native JavaScript. It is not so hard with LoDash or jQuery, but I wanted to do it native.

Double Click to Select All Code

When you want to display code, you are probably using PRE elements. The fact that these elements can contain markup makes them perfectly suited for syntax highlighting. Some plugins make it easier to copy the code using a button. Google Prettify has no such option. Let’s see if we can make copying easier by providing a “double click to select all”-feature to our pre fields.

Serving SASS files for WordPress theme on IIS

I love SASS. What’s not to love? Well… it can’t be served directly by the web server like CSS. It needs to be pre-compiled before it is served. Fortunately there is a PHP SASS compiler that can be used to make PHP compile and serve SASS. I’m using an IIS installation, so I’ll be explaining how it can be done on a Windows machine.

A (slightly) better WebClient class supporting cookies and headers

Sometimes you’ll need a (slightly) better C# WebClient that’s able to store/retrieve cookies, prevent redirects or retrieve the HttpStatusCode of a request. I’ve created a small class that facilitates these features.

Fixing an ‘Unable to Parse Bindings’ Error in Knockout.js

Multi-statement logic inside a Knockout.js data-bind expression can trigger an “Unable to parse bindings” error. Wrapping the logic in an immediately invoked function expression provides a compact solution.