As I move more of our website’s code to the idiom of Vue.js, I wonder how to best explain this to my colleagues. Vue is commonly referred to as a “framework”, but this is not super enlightening to a non-programmer. It can be a bit hard to explain what Vue does, because it deals in… Continue reading In which we puzzle over what is a “framework”
Category: javascript
Time
Programming around dates, times, and timezones is painful. I’ve done this in Python and in JavaScript and it was miserable either way. It’s due to the complexities of time that we mostly ignore in our day to day lives. We are able to do this because we generally are not in multiple timezones at the… Continue reading Time
Hours widget
When we built the current library webpage in 2021, I wrote a homemade widget in JavaScript to display the library’s hours. It has worked consistently since then without any problems, perhaps surprisingly, since the code is very ugly. This original version of the widget drew upon a custom JSON file with the hours data, which… Continue reading Hours widget
What’s next with learning JavaScript
I confess that I mostly use JavaScript as if it were an extension of CSS. What I mean is that I am mostly using it to manipulate elements in the DOM, usually for appearance’s sake. I’m not building applications, or even using JS in a systematic way to solve problems that require some kind of… Continue reading What’s next with learning JavaScript
Widgets
Library websites often include widgets of various sorts. Hours widgets, chat widgets, and so on. Often these are built by outside vendors, and plopped into library pages by librarians. The intention, I suppose, is to provide functionality that the librarians may not want build themselves. I have contradictory feelings about widgets. First, the bad things:… Continue reading Widgets
More on the strangeness of JavaScript
I am amazed at how JavaScript can do really strange things, and JavaScript developers just seem to be totally fine with it. Maybe it’s my own misperceptions, coming from Python (with my Pythonic assumptions) that are causing my bafflement. Or maybe JavaScript developers put up with these things because, hey, it’s the language of the… Continue reading More on the strangeness of JavaScript
Vue
I was doing two things earlier this week: sitting in on a webinar about a neat library tool called Unsub; and thinking about digging further into Vue, the JavaScript framework. Anyhow, I was so impressed with the UI of Unsub that I looked up what I could about their tech stack (it’s on GitHub), and… Continue reading Vue
Into the strangeness
There’s a lot of strangeness writing JavaScript for the web. The edge cases are sometimes mind-bending. This is sometimes not the fault of JavaScript itself, but can be due to the other, non-JS things that the browser is doing. I ran into such problems recently when modifying a widget that provides access to our library’s… Continue reading Into the strangeness
LibGuides
These days, I’m really working hard at improving the library’s web presence. In part, this means moving more content over to LibGuides. As a result, we’re using more of the features of LibGuides, specifically lots of custom JavaScript and CSS. It’s nice to be tapping some of these more advanced features, and it has been… Continue reading LibGuides
The modern web
I’ve been learning some JavaScript recently. Mostly this is so that I can better understand modern JS frameworks. I have some catching up to do: it has been a while since I looked at JavaScript. Anyhow, my main takeaway from learning (a very small amount) about React and Vue.js is that the DOM isn’t what… Continue reading The modern web
