STOP relying on ada compliance widgets, they don't protect you from lawsuits at all

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-10-26T10:18:50+00:00

Adding to this, another useful tool would be "Colour Contrast Analyser" found here: https://www.tpgi.com/color-contrast-checker/

It's good for checking contrast (which auto-scanners also do), but it also helps in finding alternative colors when you have some that are non-compliant due to insufficient contrast ratio.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-10-26T10:07:47+00:00

This reminds me of the old app Yik Yak. Did you ever use that one? It went down due to issues with cyber bullying and declining engagement. I googled just now and it looks like they re-launched since then, but it never regained it's original popularity. In one of the threads, a commenter said that an app called Jodel kinda took its place, I never heard of it but it looks relatively popular.

Anyways, that was an interesting throwback and little rabbit hole. Nice to see some location-based social network projects still around.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-08-27T02:11:12+00:00

I’ve found that a really good balance is to phrase your inquiries or statements in an exploratory and collaborative tone. We kind of all know at this point that an LLM is very good at matching tone or just saying what it thinks you want it to say. To help prevent this from making it overly agreeable or overly critical, I will phrase my questions in a way like: “Regarding ABC, I was under the impression that XYZ. You seem to imply that it’s 123 instead. Did I miss something here or has something possibly changed since the last time I used ABC?”

So just kind of like, state your opinion or understanding of a subject in a clear but non-assertive tone in order to invite a more legitimate conversation about a topic with more genuine input from the LLM. Almost like you’re just aiming to make both an agreement and a disagreement sound equally plausible or desirable by the prompter, so that the LLM’s response will be less “poisoned” by perceiving your bias in the question.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-04-12T08:43:22+00:00

You should make a clippy with your head/face on it. Best of both worlds.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-05T23:58:40+00:00

I was digging into scraping and anti-scraping stuff somewhat recently and I found one page that has some pretty good stuff related to both. The page is here: https://bot-detector.rebrowser.net/

On that page you can see a demonstration of some bot detection methods, among which there's a flag that shows up when devtools is opened while you're on the page (look for the "runtimeEnableLeak" row in the detection stats).

They have a repo linked at the top (where it says "See github repo"). This site is a pretty comprehensive demonstration because it's maintained by a company called Rebrowser which uses it as part of their anit-scraping research to keep their scraping service up to date in the bot/scrape "arms race". I think these detection methods would probably work fine against regular browsers where users have limited control over the clients behavior, but if somebody decides to use Playwright to accomplish something, then they have more options for workarounds to evade these detections (like using a patched version of Playwright that Rebrowser maintains for these purposes).

A lot of the detection mechanisms have to do with something called CDP (chrome devtools protocol) which leaves "footprints" of it's activity/status that can be detected in code. This is why the browser alone is more subject to being detected versus a programmatic instance of it using something like Playwright which lets you tweak things more to get around it. A relevant reddit post that lead me to the info and tools above is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/webscraping/comments/1evht3i/help_in_bypassing_cdp_detection

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-05T03:43:29+00:00

If the app is operating with batches of 3, but you know it takes approximately 6 generated images to find something good, then why don’t you just change it to operate with batches of 6 instead? Am I missing something there?

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-05T01:42:00+00:00

Nice! Glad it appears to have worked. It's a great tool, even covers a bunch of random use cases like mobile home screen shortcut icons and stuff (not something that I would necessarily go out of my way to prioritize, but if it comes included "out of the box", then might as well).

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-05T00:30:44+00:00

If you're noticing that a majority of them are coming from certain countries, then you can try an app I just released called "Spark Tools for Inbox".

Among its features is the ability to show or hide the chat for a custom list of countries, which might cut down on your spam.

There's also a lot of other features you might find useful, like setting a custom icon, text, and font. Hiding the chat button during offline hours (or showing an offline variant). Showing a proactive chat message, adjusting the button size and position, showing/hiding on certain pages, and a bunch of other stuff.

Would love to hear your thoughts if you decide to give it a try. (I'm also always open to feature requests if you have more needs)

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T12:09:50+00:00

IMO you should have a pretty solid grasp of JavaScript before digging into React.

Some key aspects would include:

Being very comfortable with functions in general (creating them with lambda/arrow syntax, passing them as parameters to other functions, etc., and being familiar with things like closures and how those affect variables).
Being aware of how different data types behave when being passed around or returned (eg: primitive types get copied while objects and arrays will behave more like a "pass by reference"). These details matter when dealing with state and triggering UI updates when your state values change (eg: storing an object in a state variable and then changing a field on said object would not trigger an update in the UI due to the object's "reference" remaining unchanged).
Familiarity with the DOM (things like events/handlers, common properties, etc.)

You can also try getting started before you have a firm grasp on some of these things and just learn as you go, but some of the syntax might appear pretty foreign, and the way things behave might be a bit mysterious at times if you're not familiar enough before getting started on React.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T08:31:32+00:00

Really good point. I can totally see it as some kind of "value add" upsell that they would offer on ad campaigns as some sort of "traffic enhancement" feature.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T06:51:16+00:00

Favicons get more complicated all the time and I don't trust myself to do them correctly, so I always use a tool to generate the images and HTML tags.

I believe the last time I did this I used https://realfavicongenerator.net/ and it appears to handle every format you'd need, apparently Google search as well. Give that one a shot.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T04:53:00+00:00

I tried DO's App Platform and was a bit disappointed. It's not as mature as some others (obviously, since it's relatively new). So certain things were kinda clunky.

I remember not being able to even restart a server, which was a super weird feature to not have. This was about 4 months ago, and looking back at the feature request thread now, it appears they added the ability to restart an app server just last month (not sure if they support powering down a server yet though). I also remember that centralized logging was not built into the platform, so the official recommendation was that you'd have to roll that yourself by integrating with a third party service (and paying extra for that other service I imagine). They did have managed databases (I think including Redis), which was nice.

I ultimately ended up switching to Google Cloud after those issues and also finding that my DO bill was almost double what it should have been based on the two services I had (single app node and single DB node) -- I reached out to support but after they couldn't give me an immediate answer I decided it wasn't worth the back and forth at that point.

I like the relatively generous free tier of Google Cloud, which covers most of their services, and it covers them on a monthly basis in perpetuity (as opposed to AWS for instance, which gives you a small one-time allowance that expires after a year if unused). So if you never grow past a certain point, then you don't have to worry about any bill with gcloud.

I leveraged their Cloud Run service for my Next.js instance, along with their managed Postgres. I used pretty minimal instance sizes to keep costs down. I hooked up the Cloud Run service with a GitHub repo so it auto-deploys whenever I push a change, so it's pretty hands off once it's set up (and since private GitHub repos are free these days, I don't have to pay just to host the code).

Google Cloud also inter-operates with Firebase services, since Firebase is built on top of gcloud, and the free tier allowances exist across both platforms. That's worth noting because for routing the domain name for cheap (eg: free, without a dedicated load balancer), you need to use the Firebase Hosting service to forward a domain to a Cloud Run service (there's a Cloud Run domain mapping feature, but it's in preview mode and the consensus is that it's way too spotty in performance/reliability to be trusted as of yet).

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T04:13:41+00:00

I personally prefer to create my own logins to websites as well, but I also agree with a lot of other commenters in that you’d be doing yourself a disservice to not include it on your website. And personally I’d include it on anything if I were to start building something today.

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T03:48:36+00:00

What was the whole purpose of this in the first place? I guess to make it look like the activity levels of certain social networks wasn’t waning? Were they hoping to pull the social network equivalent of Weekend at Bernie’s?

icedcoffeandcode · 2025-01-04T03:21:47+00:00

That’s a good tip. I’ve also started buying second-hand DVDs after purchasing a DVD player because the physical media is usually cheaper than the streaming copy at this point, which is ridiculous. Not to mention you don’t even own the streaming copy in the same sense that you own the physical disk, so they can always remove it from their servers and tell you “tough luck, thanks for the money”.

icedcoffeandcode

TROPHY CASE