It’s been a long time since I made any major changes to my blog structure. Hexo has already released v6, and v7 is currently in beta, but my blog is still on hexo3.
Recently, I had some free time and decided to update my blog, and also use chatGPT as a helper.
The changes I made this time are:
When it comes to writing technical blog posts, most people’s first choice is still the combination of hexo and GitHub Pages. In fact, the blog you are currently reading is also built using this technology stack.
However, I recently built two other technical blogs, not using hexo, but another static site generator called eleventy. I am extremely satisfied with the results, so I wrote this article to recommend it to everyone.
If you want to check out the two blogs I built, here they are:
Recently, I came across a great tutorial on Regular Expressions for Regular Folk, which is well-written and beautifully designed. Since Regular Expressions are commonly used in development, but not covered in my course, I decided to write a simple article on this topic.
This article is intended for beginners who have no idea what Regular Expressions are. Therefore, the explanations will be relatively simple, and the examples will be relatively easy to understand. The patterns will also be relatively fixed, with fewer boundary conditions to consider, making it easier to learn.
Alright, let’s get started!
First, let’s briefly introduce what an Online Judge (OJ) system is. Simply put, it is a system like LeetCode that allows you to submit code for problem-solving and then lets the system check it and give you the final result. Below is a screenshot of LeetCode:
Before LeetCode became popular, the most well-known OJ was probably UVa Online Judge, also known as ACM. In Taiwan, ZeroJudge is more famous.
If you happen to have a need and want to build your own OJ, what should you do?
Recently, the second edition of YDKJS (You Don’t Know JS) was released, called YDKJSY, where Y stands for Yet. Although the second edition is not yet complete, some of the initial chapters have already been made available on GitHub.
I read the first chapter, which talks about the history of JS. It mentioned an interesting issue:
As such, sometimes the JS engines will refuse to conform to a specification-dictated change because it would break that web content.
In these cases, often TC39 will backtrack and simply choose to conform the specification to the reality of the web. For example, TC39 planned to add a contains(..) method for Arrays, but it was found that this name conflicted with old JS frameworks still in use on some sites, so they changed the name to a non-conflicting includes(..). The same happened with a comedic/tragic JS community crisis dubbed “smooshgate”, where the planned flatten(..) method was eventually renamed flat(..).
In summary, it means that sometimes the JS specification must compromise with reality (existing old implementations). For example, the Array was originally supposed to add a method called contains, but it was changed to includes due to issues. Flatten was also renamed to flat.
There is also a term “smooshgate” that was specially marked above. When searching for this keyword, it was found that it was an event that occurred around March last year, related to the aforementioned flatten. When I saw this, my first reaction was, “Huh, why don’t I know anything?” After searching for information in Traditional Chinese, I found only this article that mentioned it: SmooshGate and this article that only touched on it: [Note] 3 types of JavaScript object property characteristics.
After carefully studying the origin and development of the matter, I found it to be an interesting topic, so I wrote this article to share it with everyone.
About a year ago, I directly put my blog on GitHub Issues. Although few people in Taiwan do this, many Chinese developers use this method to build their blogs.
The reason why I chose GitHub Issues at that time was simple: convenience.
In summary, I chose GitHub Issues at that time.
However, I recently discovered a big problem that I didn’t pay attention to at the beginning, which is that the SEO of GitHub Issues is extremely poor. Even if you directly search for the title of an issue on Google, you may not be able to find it.
Because this problem is quite serious, I finally moved back to Hexo.
Actually, two years ago, I had already moved my blog once, from Logdown to Hexo. But at that time, I didn’t continue to use Hexo because I thought the layout of that blog was not very good-looking.
And this time, the reason why I moved back was largely because I saw Askie Lin‘s blog. When I saw it, I was amazed and thought, “Wow, this blog is also beautifully done!” Later, I found out that it was modified using the ready-made theme Minos, so I thought I could try to switch to this theme.
After a whole day of adjustments today, I fixed a lot of things myself and tried to make the layout look the way I wanted it to. I found it quite smooth. Maybe it’s because the original code was written well, and there were no major problems in fixing it. I only changed the font size and the display of categories and article lists, and didn’t do much else.
Unless there are any unexpected circumstances, I have decided to settle down here in the future, and use GitHub as a backup place for my articles.
Long live Hexo, long live Minos 🎉
A few days ago, I posted an article on Medium titled Medium Chinese Writers’ Follower Ranking and Unprofessional Data Analysis, in which I used Node.js to write a simple web scraper and analyzed the data.
Although I briefly mentioned the data source of the web scraper in the original article, I did not elaborate much on the technical aspects. In fact, I encountered some difficulties while writing the Medium web scraper. Instead of teaching everyone how to write a Medium web scraper, I think it would be more interesting to share my experience and the solutions I found to the problems I encountered while writing the web scraper.
Therefore, this article is intended to document my experience of writing the Medium web scraper, and also includes some tutorial elements. After reading this article, you should be able to write a similar web scraper, or at least not be confused when looking at the source code.
Although the web scraper I eventually wrote was related to user data, I actually started with the article list because I had a need to scrape all of my own articles.
The reason for this need is that the built-in functionality of Medium is actually quite poor. It is difficult to find all the articles posted by an author, or it is difficult to see them at a glance. Therefore, early articles were difficult to find except through Google.
So I manually created an index of articles and organized all the articles I had previously posted. But as an engineer, this is clearly something that can be done with code! So I wanted to try writing a web scraper for the article list.
There are many HTTP Status Codes that we are all familiar with, such as 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error, and 200 OK, among others.
Among the many status codes, there is one that is clearly meant to be humorous: 418 I’m a teapot.
But did you know that it is not part of the HTTP standard, so it is not a standard HTTP status code? You might say, “I’ve read the RFC, how can it not be?” But that RFC has nothing to do with HTTP, and many people have not noticed this.
I didn’t notice this at first either, and I thought 418 was part of the HTTP standard until someone posted an issue on Node.js’s GitHub in August 2017: 418 I’m A Teapot.
The issue mentioned that they wanted to remove support for 418, and when the author of the issue was told that Go was doing the same thing, they also posted an issue on Go.
At the time, the request to remove the 418 status code actually caused quite a stir, and most people were actually against removing this status code. There was even a save418.com created to try to save 418.
Recently, I spent some time studying the whole thing, and in the process of organizing it, I found that whether you are for or against it, the reasons behind it are worth thinking about, so I summarized it into an article to share with everyone.
Recently, I created a small game called Lidemy HTTP Challenge to help my students become more familiar with HTTP and API integration. The game requires players to obtain the correct token according to the instructions of each level. There are a total of fifteen levels, with the first ten being basic and the last five being advanced.
After some testing by friends and some adjustments and improvements, I let my students test it and found that the response was good. So I officially released this game to the front-end community so that everyone could participate.
If you haven’t played it yet, I strongly recommend that you don’t read this article because it will spoil the fun of playing the game (like a movie spoiler). I suggest you play it first, then come back and read this article to get a different experience.
Next, I will talk about the process of creating this game and the design of each level.
Recently, I started my teaching project again. In the first phase, I wrote this article: Using Github Classroom and Travis CI to Build a Homework Submission System. In the second phase, I wrote this article: AWS Lambda + GitHub API + Google Sheet = Automatic Sign-in System. Both of them use existing tools to quickly create systems that meet my needs.
Before the third phase, I hoped that the course could have a discussion forum where students could easily ask questions. I have always used Slack, but the biggest disadvantage of Slack is that the free version eats messages, and many good information is washed away, which is a pity. I hope there is a forum or discussion forum that would be better.
Two years ago, I also wrote an article: Self-hosted Forum Solutions: Flarum, Github Issue, NodeBB, Discourse, studied several solutions, and finally chose GitHub Issue. Because it is the simplest and most convenient, but the biggest disadvantage is that students don’t seem to be used to it, because it doesn’t look like a forum when you look left, right, up, and down.