Both Pulito and VanillaJS have updated to webpack 4. Additionally both have moved from yarn to npm. While npm still isn’t as fast as yarn, the support for package-lock.json files and increased attention to security and speed are worth the tradeoff.

Remember the last time silicon valley was growing like crazy without any supervision? We’re still dealing with that mess.

It’s 2018 and it’s still a bad idea to trust centralized publishing platforms. Film at 11.

Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off Storms on Two Continents On March 18th, 2018 Libertarianism, aka the #Just-Trust-In-The-Giant-Corporations movement, died of a self-inflicted gun wound to the head. In lieu of flowers, please send regulators to look after your citizens privacy.

My VanillaJS project, where I re-implement popular framework sample apps in vanilla JavaScript, has now been ported over to ‘a la carte’ web development. In this case that means they all use pulito for their tooling and directory structure, and individual framework ports bring in templating libaries as needed. For example, the React sample rewrite uses lit-html for templating, and the Angular sample rewrite uses hyperHTML for templating. This is a perfect example of the power of a la carte web development, where you get to pick the components you want and only have to ‘pay’ for what you use.

Stop using JS Frameworks is something I’ve been advocating for years now, and a legitimate question I get is what do you replace it with? The answer is “a la carte” web development. Instead of picking a monolithic solution like a web framework, you just pick the pieces you need. I don’t mean any old random pieces, below I am going to outline specific criteria that need to be met for some components to participate in a la carte web development.

I have just discovered a downside to using SMS as a 2-factor authentication method, as I sit here at 30,000 ft, unable to login to github.

“Neat” – as applied to drinks served in bars – refers to a shot of liquor poured directly from the bottle and into a glass. There is no chilling involved with a “neat” drink. There is never an additional ingredient in a drink served “neat”. Up, Neat, Straight Up, or On the Rocks The Custom Elements V1 spec has reached concensus and implementations are going well, which is all great news, but what I find surprising is the lack of VanillaJS custom elements on WebComponents.

I love custom elements! I've been building UIs with them since Polymer 0.5 was announced in 2014. One of the things that I've questioned with custom elements has been Shadow DOM and its relationship to CSS. This page is an experiment for comparing custom elements with and without Shadow DOM. Press the buttons below and 1,000 spinners will be displayed on the page, when 'Light' is pressed the custom element uses CSS defined for the whole page, and when 'Shadow' is pressed the custom elements have a style sheet attached to their Shadow DOM, and when 'External' is pressed the CSS for the element is still encapsulated in the Shadow DOM, but it is loaded as an external stylesheet.

Rats, I’m going to be travelling on the 28th and will miss this StartupGrind event: [https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-triangle-presents-how-transloc-scaled-in-the-triangle-and-exited-to-ford#/](How Transloc Scaled in the Triangle and Exited to Ford).

Paul Kinlan’s A simple clientside templating langauge has a client side templating library using data- attributes, and the implementation comes in at around 25 lines of code. Definitely a great example to demystify templating and demonstrate that you don’t always need a framework or large library to get the functionality you want. Stamp is a similar library I put together a few years ago with the same goals in mind, but weights in at 250 lines of code.

Via TechCrunch: Ford acquires Autonomic and TransLoc as it evolves its mobility business It’s great to see another great North Carolina company get recognized.

One of the goals with my new blogging system has been a flow for getting hand drawn images onto the blog. I will admit this is purely driven by jealousy of the awesome drawings on the morning paper. I didn’t know if I’d ever find a setup I would like until I got to borrow a Google Pixelbook, which is just an amazing machine and deserves a writeup on its own, but has several key features, such as the ability to run Android apps and the ability to fold over and turn into a tablet, along with one of the best digital pens I’ve ever used.

Brid.gy has a cool feature for automatically posting blog posts to Twitter, which is interesting because it uses Webmentions to kick off the whole process. I.e. just including the link: <a href="https://brid.gy/publish/twitter"></a> The webmention sent to brig.gy triggers it to look back at the post, parse it and look for microformats indicating what content to publish, and then posts it to Twitter. Note that this also works for Facebook and Flickr, and you obviously need to authorize brid.

I just recently finished adding support for Twitter metadata to the blog, mostly motivaged by brid.gy’s ability to use Webmentions to automatically post my blog entries to Twitter. As I worked on the Twitter metadata I wondered if other silos had their own metadata they supported. Indeed they do, and Kevin Marks brilliantly demonstrates how ridiculous the situation is by creating a blog post that appears different in every silo.

This SingularityHub post brings a good perspective on the economics of asteroid mining: Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids Besides, the idea of our gateway to becoming a space faring civilization being bootstrapped from a space gas station is so much more Expanse level scifi that I can’t help but like it.

Looks like Google Cloud Platform now has a Free Tier. I know Google App Engine has always had a free tier, it’s nice to see Cloud Platform offer something similar. That explains why my monthly bill for hosting my blog went from $9/month to around 0.75$/month. The only thing I exceed the free tier on is egress bandwidth.

There’s a road under that, somewhere.

As Chris suggested, I have gone beyond my minimal webmentions, and thanks to the heavy lifting of Will Norris, I got to avoid handwriting a microformats parser in the process. This is what they should look like in action:

Underdash is neat project in the same vein as my VanillaJS. While VanillaJS shows you how to build common web framework sample apps using just vanilla JS, the Underdash site shows you how to make the most of JS intrinsics without the need for a JS utility library.