I’ve been a fan of Display Posts since the days of straight Non-Programistan. Despite the fact that I can write my own stuff from scratch, Display Posts still comes in handy all the time. The following are just two little tricks used in a recent course site. I’m just skimming the surface of the capabilities […]
Category: Web Development
PHP Middleware for Keeping Your JS API Secrets Secret
Origin Story We were looking to pull in live weather data for a eco-related design contest that VCU Qatar is hosting. I found a free API for weather but wanted a way to use it via javascript and not expose any secrets. That led to the script below. Many APIs have query strings that require […]
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Taming a River Theme
Origin Story Matt worked long hours making an incredible theme for Footprints on the James course.1 It’s in WordPress but a large portion of the site ended up being built by hand as complexity increased and time dwindled.2 That means it’s hard-coded HTML/PHP. Now because the site was so great, we ended up having a […]
H Tags and Auto-Constructing an Anchor Index
Origin Story I got a fairly dense Word document that needed to go online in way that people could more easily navigate. After checking it out, it appeared we had a large number of sections but we were lucky in that they were designated by H tags of various levels. Now I could have gone […]
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Logging in PHP
In javascript, figuring things out is not to bad. For almost everything, I can just use console.log(whatever) and spit out the data I’m trying to figure out right there in the browser. With PHP is more difficult. You can var_dump() many things. You can improve on that using print_r to make those gnarly1 objects and […]
Filter WordPress Title but Only in Admin Area
I am playing around with unfurling1 open graph data in the WordPress TinyMCE editor. You can see what that looks like in the video above. It’s a lot like the oEmbed experience in WordPress but with the open graph information driving it. I want the data to go into the post body but I don’t […]
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Digital Histology & the Long Haul
Normally we finish our projects in anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Digital Histology has been the exception to that rule. I can see a reference to the site going back to Nov. of 2016! That doesn’t mean we’ve worked on this site continuously for years. The gaps have been frequent and […]
Live Action CSS Editting
Jeff did a nice intro to HTML/CSS course today and made a chunk of solid CodePen resources. I did one small example but I got to the scoped contenteditable something that I’ve been waiting to use since I saw it come up a few weeks1 Anyway, new to me. What it lets you do is […]
Top Hat Content Rescue Bookmarklet
We have more and more people building things in Top Hat. Top Hat has some useful features (and a very aggressive sales team) but it’s not a place that makes it easy to get your content out. I am working with some of our biology faculty who have gotten an Open Stax textbook in there […]
Photography is Magic
I’m co-teaching a class this semester on digital photography with John Freyer. It’s aimed at undergraduate non-art majors and it’s blended. There will be lots of field trips and a chunk of online work. There is no particular camera required. Many of the students will be using phones but some have DSLRs. I’m building the […]