Explainers

Introduction I have had my eye on Astro for a while. It looked like the perfect fit for the static websites that I manage. But because of the following reasons, I didn’t want to switch: I was/am very satisfied with SvelteKit’s static adapter. There was no support for Astro in Webstorm (my IDE). I didn’t know that the prefetch addon existed. I use something similar in SvelteKit and didn’t want to migrate some sites without that functionality. What changed? Well, since Webstorm 2023.1 there is an Astro plugin. Combine that with some curiosity and my discovery of the prefetch addon and off I went. ...

Introduction A lot of people think I hate WordPress, I really don’t. But I hate the way its grossly misused across the web. In this post I’ll briefly talk about what WordPress is, since everybody keeps forgetting it. Why you shouldn’t use it and why this matters. Why this matters Simple, it is used A LOT. According to Kinsta it has a market share of 43%. And to be clear, that is of all websites. That is huge! ...

Introduction In this post I’ll explain the different ways you can render a webpage, their pros and cons and some examples where I think some methods are better suited than others. CSR (Client Side Rendering) In CSR only the bare minimum for the initial page is sent by the server. Any other logic, data fetching, templating and routing required to display content on the page is handled by JavaScript code that executes in the browser/client. ...

Introduction Recently an update to Ghost CMS caused it to not work anymore with MariaDB. MariaDB isn’t officially supported on Ghost but since it’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL in 9/10 cases it doesn’t present any issues. Until it did. What happened? Apparently it was an upstream issue with Knex. For those of you wondering what Knex is: A batteries-included, multi-dialect (PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB, MSSQL, SQLite3, Oracle (including Oracle Wallet Authentication)) query builder for Node.js. ...