Spam APIs in 2024

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I enjoy building API demos so I generally keep an eye out for interesting APIs to play with. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I had not seen anyone talking about or sharing information about Spam APIs. I may be showing my age a bit, but it feels like spam was a much larger issue back in the early days. It was something you always heard about and worried about but not so much anymore. Much like nuclear war. I did a bit of digging and it turns out Chris Coyler had similar thoughts 4 years ago: "Spam Detection APIs". I thought I’d check out a few myself and share the results. Here, in no particular order, are the APIs I tried. Test Data # Before I looked into any APIs, I gathered... more →
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Using PDF Content with Google Gemini

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Back in February Google announced Gemini 1.5, their latest, most powerful language model, and while access has been open via AI Studio, API access has only been available in the past few days. I thought I’d try out the new model and specifically make use of the larger context window to do prompts on PDF documents. I discussed something similar earlier this year(("Using AI and PDF Services to Automate Document Summaries")[https://www.raymondcamden.com/2024/01/08/using-ai-and-pdf-services-to-automate-document-summaries]) which made use of Diffbot, so I thought it would be interesting to build a similar experience with the Gemini API. At a high level, it’s not too difficult: Begin... more →
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Three Cool (to me) Node.js Features

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I’ve been using Node.js on the regular now for probably over a decade, but one thing I’ve never done well is keep up to date with its features and new additions. In general, my brain just thinks "use javascript" and that’s all. The last time I really cared about what precisely was supported was when I was using fetch in client-side JavaScript and it wasn’t supported natively in Node. Luckily I could just use node-fetch and be done with it. That being said, I recognize I’ve not done a great job of keeping track of updates to Node itself so I try to notice it when folks mention it. Over the past week or so I’ve encountered not one, not two, but three... more →
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I’m So Old: Web Edition

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Time can be a funny thing. I still remember discovering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding. I still remember my first college programming course. I still remember my first day at my first coding job, then my first day at my second coding job, and then my first day at Mozilla. I still remember my first day coding for MetaMask. This year marks my 20th year as a professional software engineer and it’s happened in the blink of an eye. Every once in a while I will make an old programming reference to a much younger engineer and then realize they have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m so old… Webpage layouts were being done with <table>s and this new “CSS float”... more →
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Responding to HTML Changes in a Web Component

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While driving my kids to school this morning, I had an interesting thought. Is it possible for a web component to recognize, and respond, when its inner DOM contents have changed? Turns out of course it is, and the answer isn’t really depenedant on web components, but is a baked-in part of the web platform, the MutationObserver. Here’s what I built as a way to test it out. The Initial Web Component # I began with a simple web component that had the following simple feature – count the number of images inside it and report. So we can start with this HTML: <img-counter> <p> <img src="https://placehold.co/60x40"> </p> <div> <img src="https://placehold.co/40x40"> </div> <img... more →
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Using Intl.RelativeTimeFormat for Localized Relative Timings

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I’ve been singing the praises of the web platform’s Intl object for years now, but it still continues to impress me. While I’ve seen it before, today I came across the RelativeTimeFormat API which looks absolutely fabulous. I played with it a bit and thought I’d share some tips. The Basics # The RelativeTimeFormat API works like so: Given a locale… Given a difference (in either a positive or negative value)… And given a unit of time, like ‘hour’ (or ‘hours’) Report the difference in the user’s desired language. So for example: 3 and day, "in 3 days" -1 and day, "one day ago" 18 and hour, "in 18 hours" Also,... more →
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Converting a Vue 2 App to Alpine.js

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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: ,

TIL – submit() versus requestSubmit()

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Today I learned (well, technically, a few days ago, the week has been a lot), that the web platform supports a requestSubmit method. Since the beginning of time (or the beginning of JavaScript), we’ve been able to submit forms like so: var myForm = document.getElementById('theform');myForm.submit(); I intentionally used getElementById there as a reminder of what we had before jQuery. Given that, why do we need another method? Two important requests. Reason the First # When using submit, any validation of form fields is completely skipped. Consider this form: <form method="post" id="theForm"> <p> <label for="name">Name</label> <input... more →
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