J.Kirchartz Web Yinzer

Notes

Blog Post Bookmarklet, or Stealing Stefan's Idea…

A fine fellow told me about their bookmarklet for making GHpages posts so I’ve decided to steal their idea, I love bookmarklets. …

See More »

Faster Blogging with ChatGPT

Skip ahead to thoughts about ChatGPT Prompt: write a blog post about how to write blog posts faster …

See More »

Normalcy and Virality

Normalcy and Virality screenshot

I have a confession. I am a poster. I post. Sometimes, I even shitpost. This is a story about two shitposts. Both alike in dignity. The ask was simple: “Are you normal? Please repost for reach.” One posted to Twitter, the other to Mastodon. …

See More »

First post in 80 days

100 days to offload is going slower than expected. Two completely separate extended-family situations hoisted house-hunting and home repair upon me the past few months, but that’s no excuse - I could’ve written about …

See More »

In Defense of JavaScript

In Defense of JavaScript screenshot

I’m bored of the generic bashing on JavaScript. Everyone has done it, it’s “Language of the Web” and we’re online where the memes are. Memes die hard. Most critiques of JavaScript cover the same well-worn paths …

See More »

Distraction-Free Offline Reading With Ebooks

I’ve been trying to spend more and more time offline, but I find that when most of the stuff you read comes in a digital format it’s hard to focus on reading with every other app trying to distract you. That’s where this technique really helps. …

See More »

Steel City Codefest 2016

This post was originally drafted in 2016, so happy belated 5th anniversary to this draft. In April of 2016 I participated in Steel City Codefest, I’ve never done a hackathon before and wasn’t sure at all what to expect. …

See More »

2010 Web Developer Interview

Introduction In 2010, the mobile web was still in its infancy and CSS3 and HTML5 were starting to take traction. - Standards Compliance meant broken websites - ugly hacks often saved the day. …

See More »

Your Culture is Not Yours Alone

You worked hard brainstorming your company values, hours of meetings, days of discussion with core stakeholders, and finally you get a handful of things that define who You are as a Corporate Person. A list of words or concepts, about how fun and unique and valuable your business culture is! …

See More »

100 days to offload

A friend mentioned 100 days to Offload to me, and it got me thinking, …

See More »

Unix as a CMS

Recently I’ve discovered the tildeverse, a loose federation of *nix servers inpired by tilde.club offering a shell account where you can host a site, play games, and participate in a community …

See More »

The Book Metaphor

Imagine a friend shows you a photo of a book online — well, you presume it’s a book, it could be a magazine, an encyclopedia, or even a journal, it’s hard to tell from a picture …

See More »

Five Things I Learned Working at Google

I worked with Google in 2015, and learned a few “best practices” about how …

See More »

Remember Mailto?

“How do I send this to my Mom…” she asked herself scrolling up and down the page; “…I can tweet or add it to pinterest,” she sighed in resignation …

See More »

The Most Innovative Checkout Form Ever

I don’t know if you’re ready for this - it might blow your mind… …

See More »

Randomize Cowsay Critters

Cowsay is a fun little app that draws a cow that says things, but you can do so much more than a cow, there’s all sorts of fun ascii art critters in there; but how do we get to them? …

See More »

How Many Apocalypses Have I Survived?

How Many Apocalypses Have I Survived? screenshot

I’m surprised at how easy it is to survive the end-times as predicted by mediums, prophets, clergy, mathematicians, charlatans, and true-believers. …

See More »

Glitchy 3bit dither

Glitchy 3bit dither screenshot

I’d like to officially introduce my new pet project, Glitchy 3bit Dither, it’s an in-browser emulation of glitch art techniques. …

See More »

Slate, Vimium, and never touching the mouse again.

It’s no secret, I’m VIM fan. Any time I have to take my hands off the keyboard to mess with a GUI I have issues. My palms get all sweaty, I break out in hives, and have a vague feeling like I’m playing a game of whack-a-mole. Well, it may not be that bad, but I’m sick of it. So I decided to do something about it. …

See More »

VIM quick-start, cheat-sheet, and links

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might know my editor of choice is VIM, it’s very clean. There’s nothing there to get in your way, except your own limitations, and those limitations can be destroyed through practice. Haven’t tried vim yet? What are you waiting for? …

See More »

Why I Stopped Designing in Photoshop

When I was learning design I was glued to photoshop. Touching every filter and tool, researching customisation and automation. Working hard to improve my skills, and learning all the tricks and etiquette, but it was hogging my time. It was all fluff, web browsers don’t care about your layer-naming scheme or how well you use smart objects. The web is open, free, and unpredictable; Photoshop is none of those things. …

See More »

Hello Github, Goodbye Blogger

I’ve always been an early adopter and when blogs were just becoming a thing Blogger was one of the first companies doing it, how else would they get such a great URL? For a time I was fine with the way blogging worked there, but now I am disappointed. Enough so to leave. …

See More »

There is no such thing as pixel-perfect web design

There, I said it. Now get the phrase out of your head, it doesn’t exist, please stop trying. …

See More »

Rocking StackOverflow: Sites to Troubleshoot Code in Your Browser

StackOverflow is an awesome community, devs helping devs become better devs, it’s a nice concept. More often than not, solving these problems will require setting up a test somewhere, for javascript that’s easy just use jsfiddle, but other languages you might have some work to do. I often hear my fellow dev’s asking “Is there a JSFiddle for…” almost any programing language. Well, friend, here’s my list of sites, sandboxes, and demos that make writing & repairing code with your browser all sorts of easier …

See More »

Staying on Top of Web Technology

I wrote this piece in October of 2011 for the Songwhale Blog, re-posting it here for prosperity. …

See More »

Intro to Linux for Web Devs on Windows

I’ve been spending a lot of time using the linux CLI lately, and I know it can seem difficult at first. …

See More »

HTML5 Notepad

Here’s a little html5 notepad using localStorage. Check it out …

See More »

jQuery type effect plugin

Let’s kick it old-school, with the absolute CLASSIC typewriter effect. I couldn’t find a decent jQuery version of this effect that worked, so I pluginified some vintage javascript. …

See More »

Better Mobile Redirect

Here is a simple reusable javascript redirect that uses the Mobile Link Discovery Spec …

See More »

XUIjs for Mobile Development + 2 extensions

I recently stared playing with xui.js it’s a really nice library targeted to mobile devices, based on JQuery. I’d really like to stick with jQuery but jQuery Mobile is actually more like jQueryUI for mobile and I’m not into making everything on the mobile web look like native iPhone …

See More »

Python - HTML to CSS

I surely couldn’t have been the first to think of this, but wouldn’t it be great if you could write your HTML, then convert it to CSS? Yeah, I know they’re not really the same, but the CSS has to be attached to something. Why not pull it out and have a skeleton CSS file made for you? This short python script will read in HTML, and spit out all the CSS selectors it can find. …

See More »

The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk

The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk is a project that allows hackers & makers to share some electronics/components with each other. There’s a ton of these things going around, but it seems like they move quite slowly. …

See More »

Border Radius Toy

Border Radius Toy screenshot

This is my CSS3 Border-Radius Toy, it’s kind of a rip-off of a rip-off of BorderRadius.com …

See More »

JQuery Plugin update: Letterpress2

A While back I coded a plugin to apply the letterpress effect, since then I’ve decided that css’s text-shadow property was a better way to go, but some browsers don’t support text-shadow *cough* IE *cough* this is a slight mod to check for IE & apply the letterpress plugin to them, and use text-shadow on browsers that support it. …

See More »

New Plugin: Clickify

Here’s a quickly little plugin’ tool, that I know people will find very useful. It’s called Clickify, and it’s an answer to a problem a lot of people are concerned about. …

See More »

Jpeg EXIF Metadata Removal

Image Optimization is a fun game, trying to get just the right compression ratio to balance file size and appearance. There are a ton of tricks out there, but as a Photoshop user you generally end up with some pretty big files that are just small images. Today I had an icon, 71x30px that was 40.1kb after I resized it from a larger jpeg that was 38kb. …

See More »

Ableton Live 8 Looper & Korg nanoPAD

The music of Yoav is heavily loop based, due to the fact that every sound is either produced by his guitar or his voice. To accomplish this he has several looping delay pedals …

See More »

JQuery Extension: fixPng

PNGs and IE6, sounds like a recipe for trouble. Well you could always use the lovely DD_belatedPNG …

See More »

jQuery Plugin: Fish-Menu

Here we go, at it again with a new plugin called fish-menu heavily based on jquery.ui.potato.menu by Makoto_KW …

See More »

Hacks: FontBurner

As you might have noticed I've got I had a couple crazy “non-standard” fonts from fontburner.com. FontBurner is a great tool for hosting sIFR (scalable inman flash replacement) flash files & javascript to simply replace fonts & text with a small flash file that displays it in the font of your choice. Currently fontburner has a limited set of options regarding color/spacing etc. but with a little ingenuity one is able to add this functionality themselves. …

See More »

Tips: Walk-on Characters & Green Screen

Keying – the process used to remove green-screen – is a relatively simple process now-a-days, pick the shade of green and tweak a few numbers and you’re done; but sometimes there are issues… …

See More »

JQuery Plugin: Letterpresser

This plugin adds the Letterpress style to any assigned tag. …

See More »

Code: Simple JQuery Div Slideshow

Here’s a super-simple DIV slideshow with JQuery based on one for prototype/scriptaculous, it can be found here. The beauty is that it can contain anything …

See More »

Opinion: Protaculous to JQuery

Last night I went to my local CFUG meeting, to hear Adam Lehman from Adobe talk about the new Flash Platform & Coldfusion Products. …

See More »

How to style the List Component with AS3

Back in the good ol’ days to style the list component’s over state all you needed …

See More »