Posts tagged with "web"
02 Feb '23
Jekyll build speedups for Ruby 3.2
There’s a bunch of buzz about Ruby’s new YJIT in v3.2.0. I have to develop and maintain a bunch of Jekyll websites for work, some of which are getting into “non-trivial build time” territory (or maybe I’m really easily distracted, but a 30s build is enough for me to break my flow).
22 Jan '23
Handling Square Webhooks in Phoenix
My brother’s cafe donates a dollar to the local community centre for every coffee sold, and over the summer I built him a live “donation counter” which displays a small “thankyou” animation when anyone buys a coffee. It’s a web app which they run on an iPad sitting on the coffee machine.
21 Oct '21
Cutting ruby CI pipeline times with pre-installed bundles
I (and, increasingly many of my colleagues) are using Jekyll to create open (CC-licenced), hackable, acessible course websites & teaching content for our classes. We use a self-hosted GitLab server for all the websites sources, and then build/deploy them with GitLab CI. It works well, it means I don’t have to fight with our LMS to do interesting things, and it means I can open my learning materials to everyone (not just those who are privileged enough to be able to pay the fees to study at the ANU).
08 Apr '21
benswift.me analytics/tracking update
I haven’t had any sort of client-side analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) on
benswift.me for a long time (since around 2012 I think—several iterations
of the site ago). I use an ad-blocker myself, and the whole tracking & analytics
thing just strikes me as a bit gross.
15 Jul '20
ACMC2020: tools for organising a virtual conference
I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog for the last few weeks[^weeks] because I’ve been organising ACMC2020: the 2020 Australasian Computer Music Conference. From the conference landing page:
17 Nov '19
benswift.me dev roadmap for 2020
As a developer of web tech curricula (specifically 2D graphics & interaction design in COMP1720) there’s always a tension in trying to just teach the fundamentals and keeping the coursework up-to-date. For the latter, that doesn’t necessarily mean re-writing the course each year with the js framework-du-jour, but it’s useful to at least know what the best practices are and how to point students in a good direction if they want to go deeper.
16 Oct '19
Making Altair/Vega-Lite charts readable without squinting
My love for the Grammar of
Graphics
runs deep, and in particular for Hadley Wickham’s famous ggplot2 which showed
me the light back when I was a young PhD student. Seriously, once you have your
head around how it works it gives you datavis superpowers. These days I often
work in Python, and for datavis I’m enjoying
Altair which is based around the same
philosophy (and outputs to Vega-Lite for
rendering in the browser).
17 Jul '19
In-place XML tree mutation for Jekyll productivity
I wrote a reveal.js plugin for Jekyll so that I can make nice slides (especially for my ANU courses). Recently, though, I’ve been touching up the COMP1720 slides for 2019 and it’s getting really slow to build the website.
21 Feb '19
A dynamic Reimagine logo
I keep harping on about the Reimagine project because I’m super pumped about what it means for the way we do Engineering Computer Science here at the ANU (see here and here for more info).
16 Feb '19
Algorithmic uni marketing billboards
In the spirit of Murdoch University’s free your think marketing campaign, I’ve put together a dynamic full-page ad billboard as my pitch for the ANU’s next marketing campaign.
06 Feb '19
Class discussions on Discourse
In 2018 I (with the support of the Teaching & Learning IT team in my School) switched from Piazza to a self-hosted Discourse instance for class discussions. Specifically, I used it for COMP1720: Art & Interaction in New Media, a large-ish (~200 students) introductory code/art programming and interaction design course. This course is open to both CS and non-CS students, and can be counted towards a major in both the CS and the ANU School of Art and Design.[^artgit]
17 Jan '19
highlight.js with xtlang support
How to add Extempore syntax highlighting to web content.
02 Jan '19
The annual benswift.me re-write: 2019 edition
Welcome, traveller. You’ve managed to find my blog without being eaten by a grue. If you haven’t visited for a while, you might have noticed that I’ve re-written my website. Again.
28 Sep '18
Another reveal.js plugin for Jekyll
I use Jekyll to create my course websites and
reveal.js to create my lecture slides.
Both of them are awesome, and allow me to focus on writing (hopefully) great
content, and the formatting/presentation stuff stays out of the way until I git push the updates to the server.
22 Jun '18
Hosting a self-built jekyll site on GH pages
This blog is built from markdown files using Jekyll hosted on GitHub pages, which saves a lot of hassle involved with DIY hosting[^hassle]. There are a bunch of useful tutorials on how to set all this up.
10 Jul '17
COMP1720 teaser
If you’re an ANU student and you want to learn how to make art with code, then sign up for COMP1720/6720 in semester 2, 2017. Taught by me and a bunch of internationally recognised artists (there’s a weekly computational artist guest lecture) it’s the best way to scratch the art+code itch at the ANU.
06 Jul '17
benswift.me update (July 2017 edition)
Well, benswift.me has been given another coat of paint. The content’s still a
bit sparse, but hopefully this time it’ll be the place to go to keep up with my
adventures in livecoding, research and just generally making thing with
computers—and teaching others to do the same.
01 Dec '16
Blog refresh
Another year, and another blog refresh. It’s still a clojure-powered static site with my own fumbling, hand-rolled css, but this time I’m using Cryogen which has been pretty nice to work with so far.