My Family Allowance – a Simple Allowance Tracking Site

/ / No Comments
As you can probably tell, I’ve been on a bit of a builder kick the last few weeks. Today’s "release" (it’s been live for a few days already) is a tool to help fix a manual process we had in our family – tracking allowance for the kids. Previously we made use of a Google Sheet. Each kid had a column. When a kid would ask for something, we’d look to see when we last added allowance, multiply the number of weeks by their rate, add it, and then add another row to reduce by the amount they were spending. A simple formula on the right hand side would give a running total so they could see what their current balance was. I decided to take this manual process and... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,

– A simple web component for file previews

/ / No Comments
This was a "I can’t fall asleep and my mind is wondering" type of idea and honestly, I’m surprised at how good it came out. For a while now I’ve shared demos where a user picks an image and … something. It doesn’t matter. But I typically add a preview of the image when it’s selected. This works because once the user selects a file on their local system, JavaScript can then access the bits of that file, making it trivial then to render it. The idea I had, late at night, was simple – what if this could be a web component and expanded to cover different file types? In my imagination, it would look something like this in code: <form> <!--... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , ,

Building a Simple Markdown PWA App

/ / No Comments
While I didn’t share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need – I work with Markdown files all the time but didn’t have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me – the size of the bundled app. I created both a Mac and Windows distribution and both were around 90 megs. That’s not huge of course, but still felt like a lot for what could – in theory –... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Simple Charting with BoxLang

/ / No Comments
Building a BoxLang and want to know how to do charting with it? The answer is simple… don’t! I kid! Sorry, but for many, far too many, years now I’ve argued that ColdFusion should not include a charting library. It’s a server-side language, and in my (definitely not) humble opinion, client-side code doesn’t belong there. (I’m fine not worrying about that though – I trust that team knows their clients better than I do and knows what they’re doing.) The good news (again, imo) is that BoxLang doesn’t ship with an embedded client-side charting library. That being, I can absolutely see cases where you may be building a web app in BoxLang and want... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Simple Blog Example in Flask

/ / No Comments
As part of my efforts to improve my Python knowledge, I’ve been looking at the Flask framework for a way to build Python-backed web apps. I’ve only been looking at it for a short time, but I’m really impressed with how simple it is. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of when I first saw Express. Before that, I wasn’t sure I was going to like Node.js as it felt like a lot of work to build a simple app, but Express handled a lot of the boring parts. The same applies to Flask. To get an idea of how easy it is, here’s the basic "hello world" from the quickstart: from flask import Flaskapp = Flask(__name__)@app.route("/")def hello_world(): return... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , ,

Adding Simple Routing to Cloudflare Workers

/ / No Comments
I’ve been "playing" with serverless for years now, but honestly still feel new to it. When it comes to organization in a project that uses serverless functions, I’ve typically tried to build one function per operation. So for example, if I had a need to get a list of cats, I’d have one function. If I had a need to get information about a cat based on an identifier, I’d probably build a second one. That being said, I recently came across an example Cloudflare function that did something cool – it used a router, specifically the very lightweight itty-router. Let me share an example of how it works. What is a Router? # So I kinda assume most folks know what... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,

A Simple Slideshow Web Component

/ / No Comments
As I continue to play around with and learn more about web components, I thought I’d build a simple component to make it easier to add a slideshow. By that, I mean something that renders one picture but provides controls to go to more images. I’ve probably built this many times in the past, both in JavaScript and server-side code, and I thought it would be a nice candidate for a component. As with most of my demos so far, there’s a lot more that could be done with it, but I thought I’d share what I have so far. Once again I want to give a shout-out to Simon MacDonald for helping me get this code working. (At the end of the post, I’ll share the mistake I made, as... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,