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.

GitHub : Archiving Repositories

GitHub archive repositories

Last week, GitHub introduced archiving of repositories. While it might not seem like a news worthy feature, it is quite useful for both individuals and teams.  Two particular scenarios that I find helpful are:

  1. Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained.  This should save quite a bit of time for people who randomly end up on a project’s page, via searching GitHub/Packagist/Google or somewhere else.
  2. Provide an insight into how many of the person’s or team’s profile are active.  It’s often difficult to estimate at a first glance, when looking at a GitHub profile of a person or a team who have been developing for a long time, how many of their projects are actually actively maintained.

Easily optimize images using PHP

Via this blog post I came across this PHP image optimization library, which somewhat reminds me of this blog post from a couple of years ago.  As good as ImageMagick is, it takes time and effort to find all the right options.  With Spatie Image Optimizer you have an almost out of the box solution for optimizing images in a variety of formats.

This package can optimize PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools.

Markdown Here – a browser extension for quick Markdown

Markdown Here Screenshot.

Markdown Here is a browser extension (for all sorts of browsers too) that enables quick and easy rendering of the Markdown text into the HTML.  This works well in a number of scenarios – Gmail email composition, WordPress post editing, and a few other.

A Look Back at the History of CSS

Screenshot of Apple.com website

“A Look Back at the History of CSS” is a nice trip down the history lane as to where and how CSS came about.  It’s hard to imagine these days that CSS wasn’t always around and the web looked like whatever your browser decided to make it look like.

Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide

Daniel Göransson, a web developer with vision impairment, put together this ultimate guide to the image alt texts.  Unlike all the keyword stuffing SEO guides, his focuses on making alt texts useful for people who are using screen readers and other assisting technologies.

If you’ve never browsed the web with a screen reader switched on, this guide is the next best thing for you to understand the issues and make your sites better.