Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Vim tweaks and updates

Over the last few weeks, I have significantly changed and updated my Vim configuration.  I’ve been using the editor for decades, and yet I every time I revisit my setup, I am amazed at how far the editor progressed and how wisdom the Vim community shares via themes, plugins, configuration tweaks, etc.

Here are some of the highlights this time around:

  • Switched from Pathogen plugin manager (and Ansible bits) to Vundle.
  • Added vim-devicons plugin and a patched font that supports them.
  • Switched from Syntastic to ALE for faster and better syntax checks.
  • Improved the code completion configuration, tags, and such.
  • Added a whole bunch of plugins for developers.

I am still getting used to some new shortcuts, catching up on the documentation, and trying things out.  But if it’s been a while since you’ve looked at your own Vim configuration, I suggest you do so.  Things are moving and evolving faster than you might think.

Gmail autocomplete

As somebody who spends a lot of time in the text editor, working with code, and on the Linux command line, I see text autocomplete as one of the basic, native functionality.  It’s almost like copy-paste, selection, and undo.

Gmail has recently extended the Smart Compose feature with exactly that.  No longer it only covers the pre-defined responses like “OK, thanks” and “No problem”.  It completes pretty much any words and phrases that you type.

It’s super useful and it makes me wonder why it took so long for somebody to think of this.  Surely, the actual implementation is not all that complex (just kidding … it’s not a simple dictionary complete, it’s context aware and smart, so, yeah, it’s pretty complex).

 

And now on to the Facebook Page

As I mentioned earlier, sharing of the posts from this blog to Facebook stopped working a while back, due to the changes in the Facebook API and polices.  Rather than completely giving up on it or continue with the annoying manual sharing, I’ve decided to try the Facebook Page approach (which I’d much rather not).

So, lo and behold, here comes the @MamchenkovBlog Facebook Page.  I’m sure it’ll take me a while to find the best way of using it, if there even is one.  Please bear with me until I figure this one out.  And, as always, if you have any tips or suggestions – do send them my way.

P.S.: This post is a test of the sharing to Facebook Page functionality.

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!

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: