This Could Be Useful

Replacing/adding the syntax highlighter on Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:02:00 +0000

As you might have read in previous posts, I added a library to Blogger a long time ago to be able to use a syntax highlighter on code snippets. By default, Blogger does not have this functionality and as I regularly post code snippets I thought this was quite convient.

The library however is no longer supported, there was a bug recently and the embedding of the library is causing some issues with performance as these files are not being cached properly.

So it's time to look for something else, so in this post I'll be replacing my existing syntax highlighter with a new one.

Let's get to it!

Improving my blogs perfomance with WebPageTest - part 1

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:02:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted about the website performance tool WebPageTest, as there is an overlap between the content I post on this blog and the work I do on the blog itself, I'll combine best of both worlds and try to show how you can use WebPageTest very practically to improve your website performance.

It will likely take me a few sittings as this type of changes tend to take some time. Let's get started with the initial results:

The above is the WebPageTest score of this blog at the start of this exercise. I'll dig through the analysis, address issues one-by-one and make a before and after comparison. Let's get to work!

Most useful tools: ScrumPoker-online.org - planning poker in remote teams

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:26:00 +0000

If you are reading this, I'm making the assumption that you work, have worked or will work in a scrum team at some point in your life. And you can't say scrum without saying planning poker, can you?

We started using an online planning poker tool when going remote during the pandemic, leaving us without a physical planning poker session. At first, we asked the developers and testers to put their estimation in the chat but that means you can see the estimation of your colleagues before yours which leads to biased estimations and might make people less comfortable in giving their actual estimation. So, we looked for a tool and found one - wasn't hard because there are dozens of these types of tools out there. We landed on the super simple, free ScrumPoker-online.org, so allow me to introduce this tool to you.

As you can see, estimations can be submitted in a reusable online "room". Cards will initially be upside down until everyone submits their estimation.

Adding BuyMeACoffee to your blog or website

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 21:13:00 +0000

When scouring the internet while looking for some information on a tool I was testing out, I stumbled upon a blog that had this BuyMeACoffee plugin activated. After buying the creator of the post a coffee I figured it's a pretty neat feature to have on my own blog and you might like to add to your blog or website as well.

BuyMeACoffee is a platform that allows supporters to donate to content creators. Although it's called "Buy me a coffee" it's in fact a way of donating a small amount of money - so the person can buy themselves a well-deserved coffee - to show your support or gratitude for the provided service, information etc.

Setting it up is pretty easy; first you need to set up an account and then you can optionally add a widget to your platform. Let's take a look!

Most useful tools: WebPageTest

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 16:08:00 +0000

Along with everyone else working in a digital space or having to do anything with websites, I too find myself tinkering along with website performance.

The obvious impact on the user experience aside, a commonly heard argument to speed up the cogs in your web platform machine is SEO. Although Google is not exactly clear on how website performance impacts ranking, the provision of tools such as PageSpeed and Lighthouse could lead you to believe that it does.

An often-heard business requirement is "speed up the website", good luck with that. I've previously blogged about Google Lighthouse as a diagnostic tool that provides recommendations of what to focus on. That post however ends with a massive disclaimer on why Lighthouse is a brilliant and simultaneously horrible tool. I won't repeat myself, check out that blogpost to find out more. Let's instead focus on how to mediate some of the caveats of Lighthouse. WebPageTest is by no means a fix-all but I have found that this is easy and free to use tool does have some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve.

Let's take a look!

Twitter Card meta tags for Bloggers posts

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000

In an ironic turn of events, Twitter initially failed to load the image after I posted this. I double, triple checked my image tag and when I was about to give up, it finally did come up. Although it's odd, it seems like it was related to a missing Twitter:title tag on the homepage.

Twitter Card and OpenGraph meta tags allow you to make sharing of your content easier with a better user experience. When I publish a post I also post a Twitter message to let people know I've just posted something.

Before I post, when I did this, the composer in Twitter looked like this:

It's literally showing the url that I pasted, that's it.

After the changes I'll explain in this post, the composer in Twitter looks like this:

It's now using the meta data that I indicated to enrich the content.

By default Blogger covers OpenGraph, however Twitter won't use all those tags so if you want to cater to Twitter as well, you'll need to add some more tags.

Twitter tags are similar to Open Graph tags and based on the same conventions. More info on this convention can be found here: https://ogp.me/.The composer will look for Twitter tags first, if they are not present, they will fall back to the OG tags but using the Twitter tags will get you the best result.

Adding a Twitter feed to your website or Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000

To connect my blog with my Twitter profile, I wanted to add a Twitter feed in my About page to show that I have a Twitter profile and what type of tweets I post.

Through the Twitter Publish tool this was super easy to do, so it's going to be a very short post today.

Let's get started and set this up!

Go to publish.twitter.com to generate the url to embed.

Publishing an RSS feed through follow.it and how to subscribe to it

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 19:40:00 +0000

Publishing an RSS feed is a great way to increase the engagement with your audience and make it easier for your subscribers to follow your content.

Blogger used to use Feedburner for this as both platforms where Google owned. Unfortunately the e-mail subscription services of Feedburner have been decommissioned, leaving me (and many others) without a way of notifying readers when a new post becomes available.

Basics first - RSS what?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, it's a standardized, computer-readable format of content.

An RSS feed is a way for subscribers to easily receive updates from websites they follow. Think of it like a newsletter that's automatically delivered to you. Whenever the website updates with new content, you'll receive the update in your RSS reader or mailbox (or both), so you don't have to constantly manually check the website for new posts.

Most useful tools: Momentum

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:56:00 +0000

There are tools that you love, you use them, you don't think about it twice. If you get a new computer they would be the first tools you would install again. Not really software but a Chrome extension that I just love and have been used for years: Momentum.

A colleague had this on their pc when they were showing something to me, I asked what it was, installed it and have loved and recommended it to others since! I use this to turn a new browser tab - which I often use to shield from the distraction of the +312 open browser tabs - to something nicer to look at and to help me focus.

This is what my setup looks like, I like the minimalistic view. I love the pictures (with location), quotes, clock and the nice greeting :) I'll show you more options below!

Most useful tools: TeamViewer

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 21:22:00 +0000

This is an oldy, but goody: TeamViewer. This remote access, control, and support software allows you to get and give access to your device to someone else.

Personally, I've used this often when troubleshooting with users, clients or, yes, family members who call you because you are the IT person :)

More on TeamViewer, how to use it and a disclaimer on its use below!

When the company blocks posting GIFs in Microsoft Teams

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 21:46:00 +0000

In our company they blocked the GIF option in Microsoft Teams, yes, i'm serious.

There is a lot to be said about the "Are you kidding me? Why?" of this. If you prefer to skip the rant, look at "Read the policy and do it anyway" title to find out how you can still actually post GIFs if your company did the same. #canstopwontstop

Whatever formal communications policy is being waved in your face to argue the point, is just nonsense. Studies show that use of GIFs and other forms of nonverbal communication, such as emoticons and emojis, can actually help increase social presence and emotional expressiveness in virtual teams, which can lead to more positive team dynamics and improved communication. Read that again "positive team dynamics" and "improved communication".

Another study found that the use of GIFs in workplace communication can be beneficial in that it can help to reduce social distance and increase social presence, which can lead to improved team atmosphere and increased productivity.

How to make the IT support team love you

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 19:05:00 +0000

If you are reading this blog, it's likely you engage with an IT support team in your daily job. At my job we noticed a lot of the same mistakes or missed opportunities when support tickets were being created. To optimize our processes, we worked on things such as ticket templates, priority categorization and user training.

As an example; we noticed a lot of back and forth (what we call "ping-pong") on the tickets as users created one, explaining their issue but not giving us any information that would allow us to test this ourselves or to try to reproduce it. So, our first reply is one asking for more information, they provide more information, we check again, find something else missing, ask for more information, which they provide. In the end a lot of time and momentum goes to waste waiting for the right deliverables to be provided.

To address this, one of the things we implemented was a guideline for our users in which we shared what we expected from them. If they wanted their ticket to move faster, these were the things we asked them to provide from the get-go.

Improving website performance with Google Lighthouse

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 21:41:00 +0000

If you are trying to improve the performance of your website, one of the first tools that should come to mind to do so is Google Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is an open-source tool provided by Google which audits your website and scores it in five categories;

Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
PWA

The output will be individual scores on each of the categories and a report with recommendations. You can run tests for mobile and for desktop.

iTextSharp and how to add metadata

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Fri, 02 May 2014 23:56:00 +0000

Another chapter in the iTextSharp tutorials! It seems that there's a pretty big demand for these kind of tutorials so I'll do my best to add some more in the future. If you're looking for something specific, feel free to let me know and I'll see what I can do ;)

Today I've got something pretty basic lined up for you: metadata!

As you might or might not know, you can add metadata such as author, title, keywords, ... to a PDF file to specify some specifics about who created the file, when and why.

This is a small and simple example but I figured that the iTextSharp newbies might appreciate it, so let's get to it!
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Undo the VS 2012 black/white layout to blue VS 2010 style

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 10:22:00 +0000

Microsoft has been working hard on the latest Visual Studio releases, with more and more features that make life a lot easier for developers.

Unfortunately, if you're like me, you will probably continue to wind up in situations where you have to use older versions of our beloved IDE. In the case of this project, I'm stuck with VS 2012 SP 1 and if there was one thing about VS 2012 I hated and really absolutely hated, it was the black/white layout.... .
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Accessing controls inside a ListView

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:18:00 +0000

So, a friend of mine asked my help with a developing problem he encountered: he had a listview in a listview but in the code behind, he could not access the nested listview. Since I ran into this problem once myself and forums are loading with the same question, it seemed like a good idea to write a blog post about it for those who encounter this issue in the future!

Let's start by explaining why the nested listview is not accessible. I also have a nice example set up for you to show you how it's done.
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Fixing the syntax highlighter

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:44:00 +0000

Update: it seems the website of the SyntaxHighlighter no longer exts.

You may have noticed that lately I was having some issues with the syntax highlighter that I use when I post code. I fixed it now, so you (hopefully) won't see it occur again, but for those who missed it:

This is the code snippet of the topic about image sprites (read it here:

https://www.thiscouldbeuseful.com/2012/10/image-sprite-magic.html). As you can see something was going terribly wrong as it was displaying extra lines and the line numbering was seriously off.

The syntax highlighter I use for this blog was created by Alex Gorbatchev (make sure to check out his website: https://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/) (link intentionally broken as this website seems to no longer exist) as I explained in this blogpost: https://www.thiscouldbeuseful.com/2012/03/adding-syntax-highlighted-code-to-your.html. The highlighter is great, it's easy to use and it does what it should do (except for this little mishap) so thumbs up for Alex Gorbatchev!

Now, back to the issue:
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Most useful developer tools: Notepad++

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:15:00 +0000

Notepad++is a tool that definitly deserves a spot in our "Most awesome developer tools" list. This more advanced alternative for Notepad is very popular with developers for its syntax highlighting skills.

First and foremost, if you're not already using Notepad++, I suggest you go to the website right now and download it (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) and then we'll pretend like that never happened...

Lets continue... Notepad++ is a superior code editor for developers but "normal users" may get a thrill from it too as it has much more functionality than the default Windows notepad and is more intuitive to work with. It is released under the GPL license which basicly means that it is awesome AND free!
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Some very useful links

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:12:00 +0000

In my daily research (read: getting stuck and Googling desperately for help), I sometimes encounter interesting links that I -obviously- like to share with you. I used to post these on my twitter account, but then there's no way to "keep" these links or to find them again. So from now on you'll be able to find them here!
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Unable to start debugging: the version of clr.dll...

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:51:00 +0000

So, this morning I arrive at work, I boot my pc, open Visual Studio and get to it. I do some coding and when I want to run my project (for the first time today) to test the changes I get this thrown at me:

It was fine the day before and there were no problems loading the project or whatever, so you could call this strange to say the least :( My first Google search said re-install, but luckily it didn't go that far. So for all those that get confronted with this problem, I made an overview of what causes this problem and how to fix it!
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Image sprite magic!

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:28:00 +0000

Image sprites, I mentioned the topic in one of my last posts: https://www.thiscouldbeuseful.com/2012/10/frontend-greatness-some-html-and-css.html and promised to dedicate an entire post to the matter... behold, an entire post on image sprites!

If you are not (yet) familiar with image sprites, then I can tell you that it's definitely not what you think it is based on the name :) It is actually a pretty cool css technique that speeds up and simplifies the process of switching state images. How? By grouping related images in one file! Confused yet? No worries, one clear explanation coming up!
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Frontend greatness: some html and css tricks!

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:02:00 +0000

So... I'm normally a developer: I don't do design and I don't do architecture, I'm somewhere inbetween and I'm just fine there. UNTIL... I was asked to do a little design project! Well, not really design, because the day I become responsible for that oh so important first glance of a website, will be sad day in the history of web applications :)

Anyways, I was asked to convert a PhotoShop design to a HTML/CSS website. Although I am pretty familiar with both HTML as CSS, the hard part is shutting up the developer part of you that doesn't like static pages and is wondering where the database went.

So right about now, you might be looking for the point of this post, so here it is: in this short period of front-end developing, I want to share with you all of the new, cool, design-people tricks I learned.

Most useful developer tools: ReSharper!

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:34:00 +0000

On popular demand, the topic of today is ReSharper! Ever since I started the "Most useful developer tools" tag, people have been screaming in my ear about ReSharper. And it's true, this is probably the favorite tool of a whole lot of developers.

"The legendary .NET productivity tool: find and fix errors and code smells; navigate and refactor; run unit tests and write quality code faster."

ReSharper or R# is an extension for Visual Studio, a "developer productivity tool". It analyses and improves your code on the fly. You can use it to optimize your code, it helps you track errors and even provides quick-fixes. Before I go any further, I should warn you that this tool is not free. It's not cheap either but if you get used to this and use it to the full extend, I can garantee that it will be worth it. More about licensing later on. Back to the topic: ReSharper...
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Most useful developer tools: SQL Server Profiler

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 17:52:00 +0000

While programming, database actions can be the hardest to debug, since we don't always know which traffic goes from the application to the database.

That's why I would like to introduce another tool in the list of "Most useful developer tools", that makes it possible to trace the database traffic. It will show you all queries sent to the database which could point you to an error in the query or even performance problems if these queries aren't written probably or if they are executed more times than they should be.

So for all your database debugging frustrations: meet SQL Server Profiler!
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Fallback method for your CDN

noreply@blogger.com (ThisCouldBeUseful) — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Remember this one: https://www.thiscouldbeuseful.com/2012/09/library-cdns-or-hosted-libraries.html? The one where I tell you why you should use hosted libraries because they are so great? I hope I managed to convince you of the usefullness :) of this and that you have implemented this or plan to do so soon.

Which brings me to this: whenever you use external sources, you should have a fallback just in case something goes wrong with those external sources. Depending on how much you rely on these resources, this could become a huge problem.

Well, imagine -how unlikely it may seem- that the CDN is down... then what?
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