Using Generative AI to Detect Cat Breeds / / No Comments Let’s be honest, what other use is there for generative AI than working with cats? If you read my previous post on Google’s Gemini AI launch, you may have seen my test prompts asking it to identify the kind of cat shown in a picture. I decided to turn this into a proper web application as a real example of the API in action. Here’s what I came up with. The Front End # For the front end, I decided to make use of a native web platform feature to access the user’s camera via a simple HTML form field. By using capture="camera" on an input tag, you directly get access to the device camera. There are more advanced ways of doing this, but for quick and simple, it works... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Breeds, Detect, Generative, using
AutoGrow Textareas with CSS / / No Comments As the demands of the web change and developers experiment with different user experiences, the need for more native language improvements expands. Our presentation layer, CSS, has done incredibly well in improving capabilities, even if sometimes too slow. The need for native support for automatically expanding textarea elements has been long known…and it’s finally here! To allow textarea elements to grow vertically and horizontally, add the field-sizing property with a value of content: textarea { field-sizing: content; // default is `fixed` } The default value for field-sizing is fixed, signaling current behavior. The new behavior, content, will expand as much as possible.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: AutoGrow, Textareas
An Image Dialog Web Component / / No Comments A lot of the talk (well, on Mastodon at least) lately concerning web components has been on "HTML Web Components". The idea is that web components can progressively enhance "regular" HTML in the DOM instead of completely blowing it away with the Shadow DOM. (You can find a deeper discussion of this in Jim Nielsen’s blog post.) This is something that’s been on my mind for a while now as well and I’ve kept my eyes open for opportunities to build web components that enhance, not replace, content. With that in mind, I built a really simple component that does something fun. We’ve all seen sites that use JavaScript to provide a thumbnail and detail view... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Component, Dialog, Image
Google Gemini and AI Studio Launch / / No Comments While it feels like just yesterday I first blogged about Google’s PaLM APIs and MakerSuite, it was actually over two months ago, and of course, GenAI offerings are iterating and improving at lightning speed. In the past week, Google has announced Gemini, their new generative AI model. Naturally, I was curious about the API aspect of this and took a quick look. MakerSuite rebranded as AI Studio # First off, the web UI (which I reviewed back in my first post) has been renamed to the generic and boring, but probably more enterprise and appropriate, AI Studio. Along with that, when creating new prompts, it will default to use Gemini models. (You can still select PaLM if you want.) Another change…... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Google, launch, Studio
The Twelve (Generative) Days of Christmas / / No Comments I tend to have a lot of silly ideas. Not useful ideas. Not good ideas. Silly ideas. Randomly yesterday I was thinking about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. If you aren’t familiar with it, it starts off with a gift for one day, then repeats and adds a second day, and so on and so on. The gifts are: partridge in a pear treetwo turtle dovesthree French hensfour calling birdsfive gold ringssix geese a-layingseven swans a-swimmingeight maids a-milkingnine ladies dancingten lords a-leapingeleven pipers pipingtwelve drummers drumming I thought – what if I took each of these phrases and dropped them into an AI image generator? I did, and the results were… kinda fun. Before I show... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Christmas, Days, Generative, Twelve
Awesome Netlify Updates / / No Comments For about two months now I’ve had on my queue to write about some of the incredibly cool updates Netlify has released but I just didn’t have the time. I’ve been hosting this blog on Netlify for a few years now and have been incredibly happy with the platform, but the updates the past two months have been both surprising and just really freaking cool. Here’s a quick look at what impressed me. As a quick aside, this isn’t necessarily everything announced recently and you can take a look yourself at their blog for more changes. Caching Improvements # This is an area I haven’t really done much in – both on my site or elsewhere. I generally let Netlify worry... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: awesome, Netlify, updates
Adding Music Previews to My Now Page / / No Comments About two months or so ago I added a Now page to my site. It shows my current reading list, my last watched movies, my Untappd beer check-ins, and my most recent Spotify tracks. You can see that part here: When I built it, I used a Pipedream workflow to wrap calls to Spotify’s API. My Pipedream workflow gets my most recent tracks, slims down the data quite a bit, and returns just what I need. I use some client-side code to hit that endpoint and then render it out on the Now page. (I also use a bit of caching with LocalStorage such that the endpoint is only hit every ten minutes.) Currently, when rendering each track, I link to its URL and Spotify users can listen to the track completely.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adding, Music, Page, previews
How to Play Grand Poo World 3 / / No Comments The underground world of creating and streaming Super Mario World-based ROM hacks continues to gain popularity. This popularity is a tribute to the creativity of gamers and the quality of the original 30 year old video game’s mechanics. Over the past decade, incredible ROM hacks like Grand Poo World 1 and 2, Invictus, and Dram World have brought joy (and horror) to the Mario community. Sure, Nintendo released Mario Maker and Mario Maker 2, but I love SMW Central patches because they allow all of us to create, much like open source. The most anticipated hack in years, Grand Poo World 3, was just released and is taking the Super Mario World community by storm. You cannot, however, just download... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Grand, Play, World