Technology

Instagram Importer works again!

After some digging around and troubleshooting, I managed to fix the DsgnWrks Instagram Importer WordPress plugin on my site. It turns out quite a few people had an issue with it, which started back in September/October of last year (2017). The solution, they say, is just to remove the authenticated Instagram user from the plugin settings, and add it again. I’m not quite sure if that’s the only thing that helped, as I’ve adjusted quite a few other things all around (HAProxy timeouts, Nginx timeouts, PHP maximum execution time, etc). But it seems like the right thing to start with.

Keep in mind that you should backup the current user’s settings for the plugin (screenshot or save the page as HTML or just copy-paste them somewhere), because they will be reset to the defaults when the user is re-added.

I have just now imported about 40 Instagram pictures that weren’t synchronized since the last September. Enjoy!

It’s been quiet around here

I have to admit, it’s been quiet around here for the last few weeks… even months. There is no one specific reason – it’s more of a combination of a few.

The main one being … you guessed it: WORK! I’ve been extremely busy at work lately and didn’t have a spare moment to even read the feeds, let alone blog on my own.

The rest – just contributed: this year being rich in friends and family visiting Cyprus, me moving to a new phone, Facebook changing their policy on publishing to profiles via third-party tools, and even Instagram Importer WordPress plugin suddenly not synchronizing any more.

This is not how I like my blog. I like it to have fresh links, posts, and pictures on a daily basis. Or at least weekly. Going on for almost two month without posts (with one or two exceptions) is not acceptable. So, I’ll be back. Now. I promise.

This blog will not contribute to the “blogging is dead” myth. :)

Why I’m done with Chrome

Mathew Green shares his reasons for leaving the Google Chrome development team. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s a quote from the “What’s changed?” part:

A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you. (However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet. See further below.)

Your sole warning — in the event that you’re looking for it — is that your Google profile picture will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the browser window. I noticed mine the other day:

open-policy-agent/opa – Open Source, general purpose policy agent

open-policy-agent/opa is an Open Source general purpose policy agent.

OPA gives you a high-level declarative language to author and enforce policies across your stack.

With OPA, you define rules that govern how your system should behave. These rules exist to answer questions like:

Can user X call operation Y on resource Z?

What clusters should workload W be deployed to?

What tags must be set on resource R before it’s created?

You integrate services with OPA so that these kinds of policy decisions do not have to be hardcoded in your service. Services integrate with OPA by executing queries when policy decisions are needed.

When you query OPA for a policy decision, OPA evaluates the rules and data (which you give it) to produce an answer. The policy decision is sent back as the result of the query.

The div that looks different in every browser

Martijn Cuppens tweets the link to this code snippet and a screenshot of how the code renders in different browsers. Yup. Each browser produces a different result. The Twitter thread has more examples.

This is yet another example of how CSS and cross-browser compatibility can drive a web developer insane.