Notes: Webdev

My notes about life, work and other fascinating things around me.

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No More Embedded Tweets
21 Marth 2022 ·

As soon as I removed Google Fonts from my blog, I had to remove embedded tweets as well.

How did it work before? I want to link a tweet — I simply insert the link to it. The build script replaces it with an HTML block, then Twitter founds this block and replaces it with the text of the tweet (and some useful links as well). This commit shows you how it worked.

How does it work now? You're right, it does not! Twitter is blocked in Russia.

Well

The solution: I had to screen all the tweets that I once referred to and add them to the notes in the form of pictures with links. Whoever needs the original will turn on VPN and go to Twitter, and the rest, at least, can read the text.

A few words about the technical side. I was too lazy to screen each tweet manually, so I was thinking about how to automate the process. At first, I came across only services that were ready to solve the problem for some pathetic ten dollars (thanks guys, maybe, one day…), but then I came across the perfect tool: a console script for Node.js.

Nothing that you don't need. Pure functionality. You give a tweet to it. It gives you a picture back:

npx snap-tweet https://twitter.com/PossumEveryHour/status/1506148678461014016

That's all. I want to donate the author, really.

I thought about attaching snap-tweet to my build script (so that it would be like before: I insert a link to a tweet, and then it generates a picture by itself and puts it where it needs to be). Decided that I'm not gonna do it. Rude violation of KISS, and indeed… There's enough entropy in the world so far. Especially now.

No More Google Fonts
19 February 2022 ·

Tweet

A year ago, damn it. Okay, hello everyone! Johnny Slowpoke is here! Today we will throw out Google Fonts from my blog. I used to load the main font (PT Sans) from this service, but it makes almost no sense without cross-domain caching. Frankly speaking, the only point to do this further is if a server on which the site is running is slow, so it is faster to load fonts from Google.

I host my blog on GitHub servers and have no complaints about performance. So, I'm self-hosting PT Sans now, and you know what? The difference is dramatic. When updating a page before, there was clearly a noticeable delay between loading the page and loading the font. For now, it is barely recognizable. If you have a blog and want to try to self-host fonts — here is a cool service that solves the problem in a few clicks.

Don't forget to put a big, nice star on the repository!