Cory Dransfeldt

I made a minor update to how I'm normalizing TV data for display on my now page.

My now page consists of a number of similar sections — some bespoke text, a number of media grids and lists. The text is repeated once, the lists are easily templated out in Liquid.js and the media grids are all quite similar. Given the prominence of the media grids on the page and the number of them I decided to consolidate them into a single template while also normalizing the data passed into them as best I could.

My site is built using 11ty and is rebuilt once an hour. These frequent rebuilds accomplish a few things, notably updating webmention data and keeping my now page current. Recently, however, I decided to add the track I'm other currently listening to on my home page which, ideally, would be updated in real time. Enter client-side JavaScript and Netlify's Edge Functions.

I've written before about displaying my listening data from Apple Music but, recently, I've attempted to take things a bit further.

Up until now my now page has sourced music data from Last.fm (and may well again). But, in the interest in experimenting a bit, I've tried my hand at rewriting that part of the page to leverage data from Apple Music, using MusicKit.js instead.

My talk from the Eleventy meetup about building my now page (you even get to see how much I resemble my avatar).

I've relaunched, rebuilt and rewritten my personal blog more times than I can count, and I've had a trail of posts I've never fully migrated at each turn. This weekend, while relaxing and watching movies I ported them into Eleventy and, in doing so, found that the pagination implementation I was using didn't scale well with the number of pages I added.

In an effort to get away from client-side Javascript and embrace Eleventy for what it is (a static site generator), I've dropped my social-utils instance offline and my now-playing track display on my home page that still relied on it.

As part of my commitment to writing about things I've written in other frameworks in Eleventy, this is how I re-engineered my /now page in Eleventy.

My blog is currently hosted on weblog.lol which allows for a simple and configurable weblog managed in git with posts formatted in markdown. I wanted to add webmentions to my blog which, as of now, doesn't include a build step. To accomplish this, I've added an intermediary api endpoint to the same Next.js app that powers my /now page.

omg.lol (where I point my domain) and host most of my site content recently launched support for /now pages.

SurviveJS:

Debugging JavaScript is one of those topics where people tend to be divided into two camps - those that console.log and those that use a debugger. In this interview, I am learning more about the topic from Mehdi Osman, the CEO of a company called Asayer.

I put together a script that will take a draft, grab the title and body and then prompt you for front matter data before sending the completed post off to Working Copy. It's specific to my site, and purposes, but it should be fairly straightforward and easy to adapt to your needs.

A fantastastic read by Eric Elliott on what to stay on top of in the ever-changing JavaScript ecosystem in 2017.

I've been reading a lot lately (mainly on my phone when I catch a spare moment). I've picked up several books on front end development and am currently digging in to JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.