Converting a Vue 2 App to Alpine.js / / No Comments A little over two years ago I published an "idle clicker game" built in Vue.js. I called it "IdleFleet" and was heavily inspired by games like A Dark Room, where I relied on simple text graphics and game mechanics that would change as you played. In my last <Code><Br> session, I walked through the process of building a simple text game and brought up IdleFleet as an example. While playing the game to refresh my memory about what I actually built… I discovered I actually really liked it. I decided it would be good to give it some attention with new features and other updates, but before I could do that, I knew I needed to switch from Vue to Alpine.js. Why... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Converting
Using IndexedDB with Alpine.js / / No Comments A lot of my "x with Alpine" blog posts end up being, well, nothing special. That’s a good thing I suppose as it really helps highlight how simple Alpine.js is. (Note, I go back and forth between including the ".js" when referring to Alpine. I should be more consistent I suppose. On one hand, Alpine.js is the formal name, but Alpine just feels simpler.) That being said, the impetus for this post was to get something basic done before I built something a bit more complex. So if you wish to TLDR – it just works, visit my CodePen for the full source, and come back for the next post. If you’re still curious, keep on reading. IndexedDB – Vanilla or Library?... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, IndexedDB, using
Testing Out the Alpine.js Intersect Plugin / / No Comments A few weeks ago, I finally got around to looking at the official plugins Alpine.js supports and built a little demo that integrated the Intl spec with the Mask plugin. (You can read the post here: Integrating Intl with Alpine.js Mask). Today I thought I’d take a look at another plugin, Intersect. What Is It? # The Intersect plugin is a wrapper for the Intersection Observer API. This is a pretty cool web platform API that lets you monitor when DOM elements come into the visible part of a web browser. I first dug into this a few months ago in an article I wrote for Cloudinary, "Automatically Loading High-Quality Images with Cloudinary and IntersectionObserver". In that article,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Intersect, plugin, Testing
Integrating Intl with Alpine.js Mask / / No Comments I’ve been using Alpine.js for quite a while now (although I still make silly mistakes, see the p.s. at the end) but haven’t yet looked at the "official" plugins. Listed in the docs, those plugins include: Intersect – a simple hook to recognize when an element is visible (I plan on blogging about this later) Persist – a simple hook to add persistence to Alpine data (another plugin I plan on blogging about) Focus – a way to manipulate focus Collapse – a simple UI plugin for collapsible content Morph – another UI plugin that attempts to transform one set of HTML into another (I honestly don’t quite get this one – yet) And finally,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Integrating, Intl, Mask
Want to learn Alpine.js? / / No Comments For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been releasing videos on YouTube all about learning Alpine.js. Each video is relatively short (although longer than a Tiktok video) and can be quickly consumed, with the entire playlist coming in under an hour. Each video has links to CodePens that let you immediately play with the concepts I cover. I really like Alpine (as you can see by many other posts on the topic) as it’s an incredibly simple, and practical, JavaScript framework. There’s no build process, no hundreds of megabytes of download, and it’s something you can pick up rather quickly, as I hope my video series demonstrates. Check it out, leave me a comment, and let me know... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Learn, want
Creating a Blackjack Game with Alpine.js and the Deck of Cards API / / No Comments Some time ago I ran across a pretty fascinating service, the Deck of Cards API. This API handles everything imaginable related to working with decks of cards. It handles creating a shuffled set of cards (containing one or more decks), dealing out a card (or cards), and even reshuffling. Even better, it includes card images you can use if you don’t want to find your own: It’s an incredibly feature-filled an API and best of all, it’s completely free. No need for even a key. I’ve known about this API for a while and have contemplated building a card game with it, but realized that games can quickly go from simple to fairly complex. In fact, my friends strongly urged me not... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Blackjack, Cards, creating, Deck, Game
Download Data as a File with Alpine.js / / No Comments As my readers know, I’ve been updating some of my earlier Vue.js examples to demonstrate how they would work with Alpine.js. Normally I post these "conversions" when I see one of the Vue posts pop up in my stats. Today I noticed this entry was "trending" – Vue Quick Shot – Downloading Data as a File. I thought it would be a great candidate for showing an Alpine version. Let’s take a look. While I won’t repeat everything from the previous post, I’ll quickly cover how it worked. First, it makes use of the download attribute of the anchor tag. This will take a normal link operation and instead ask the browser to download the resource at the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, data, download, file
An Alpine.js Template for Glitch / / No Comments I discovered Glitch a few months ago, and while I haven’t used it a lot since then, the more I do, the more I really dig it. When working on my blog post yesterday, I shared the demo as a Glitch project, you can see it here if you would like. While setting up the project, I fumbled a bit with the right order of script tags, which was entirely my fault, but knowing my memory I wanted to note what worked for me, and share it with others. Let’s start with the code first. Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Alpine.js, Glitch, Template