Carefully Packaged Information on Web Design & Development
JavaScript, Tips, Tools
How to Extend Laravel Nova 4 Components
How to Extend Laravel Nova 4 Components Article Featured Image

Recently I needed a way to place a custom component on the main header of Laravel Nova. There’s no specific way documented to do this, so I had to get creative.

I decided I would try to extend an existing component from the header and insert mine as an add-on to that. Strange enough, this was pretty easy to do. I was expecting some trouble, because in v3, this wasn’t as easy.

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Browser Extensions, Tools
Prevue Popup: Improving the Desktop Browsing Experience
Prevue Popup: Improving the Desktop Browsing Experience Article Featured Image

Please take this with a grain of salt and note that I’m not trying to reinvent anything here, nor am I saying that this is better than the alternatives which might already be available out there. I’m simply trying to solve my own need and maybe provide something useful to the FOSS community at the same time.

On iOS, there’s this feature which I think is called “link preview”, which is pretty self-explanatory, as it allows you to open a popup inside the current app to preview a link, by long pressing it.

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Concepts, JavaScript, PHP, Tutorials & Guides
Implementing Tree Shaking for FontAwesome
Implementing Tree Shaking for FontAwesome Article Featured Image

Tree Shaking is the process of stripping out parts of libraries that you’re not actually using in your applications in order to optimize the file size of your build. In this short tutorial I’m going to apply it to CSS and a WOFF2 file, but you can use the same technique for other types of files as well; e.g.: JS files.

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JavaScript, Tutorials & Guides
How To Move the Cursor Inside an Input
How To Move the Cursor Inside an Input Article Featured Image

I’ve hit this problem when I was working on a @mentioning system for a chat I’m developing at work. When the user selected a mentionee from the results, I needed to insert that user in the input at the current cursor / caret position.

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Concepts, Tutorials & Guides
Another Method to Protect Against Web Scrapers
Another Method to Protect Against Web Scrapers Article Featured Image

It’s common practice for people to use Web scraping (copying) to fetch the content of other sites in order to reuse the information. Sometimes this is well intended, for example, when people curate only the best of the best of the content from multiple sites. There’s also the case of news aggregators that combine news from multiple sites to provide their users with a complete list of news.

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Hacking, Tools
How To Programmatically Download VideoJS Files
How To Programmatically Download VideoJS Files Article Featured Image

Someone came up to me recently with the task of downloading a few video files hosted via OpenLoad. The files belonged to them, and OpenLoad has an API designed for this, but I didn’t find out about it until it was too late.

Nevertheless, the process of programmatically (headless) downloading files loaded with VideoJS, as is the case for OpenLoad, is pretty interesting, so I thought I should share my approach.

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Tools, Tutorials & Guides
How To Automatically Deploy Your PHP Apps
How To Automatically Deploy Your PHP Apps Article Featured Image

A typical developing environment includes versioning the application with Git, so how does one get the project into production without logging into the server every time to pull the new code, refresh the cache, compile the assets, and so on?! This seems like a bad idea to do every time you want to deploy something into production. In this article, we’re going to talk about a tool called PHP Deployer, which allows us to create a script that will do all that, and more, for us.

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Tutorials & Guides
How to Create a Pull Request
How to Create a Pull Request Article Featured Image

A pull request is a way of contributing to a Git project as a 3rd party. If you’ve found a bug or a way to improve something in an open-source project, you can use this to submit (commit) your changes to be reviewed by the moderators of that repo. The moderators have the ability to accept your changes and add them to their project, reject them, or alter and then accept them.

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Tools
Testing APIs with Postman
Testing APIs with Postman Article Featured Image

If you’ve ever worked on a real-world app or website before, you’ve probably had to use APIs. And if you did, you know how cumbersome testing them can be, because you have to set up your way for creating requests, manage tokens, and so on, before actually doing any of the real work. So you’re basically spending time building a shadow dev environment which you’ll throw away after you’re done testing anyway. What if you told you that there’s a better way? The Postman way. Continue reading…

Hacking, Tutorials & Guides
Hacking Electron Apps: How To Restyle the New Skype
Hacking Electron Apps: How To Restyle the New Skype Article Featured Image

If you don’t know what Electron is, it’s a wrapper of Chromium which allows you to develop desktop applications using Web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s been largely adopted by big companies in the last few years because it allows developers to use these very common technologies to develop desktop apps and because it provides multi-platform support out of the box. It works as an extension of Node.js and it’s open-sourced, meaning that anybody can use it.

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