Week 2 Update

Feels like a week in the abyss, not really sure what I have got done this week.

I designed some websites which is basically most of the week, design is something I really enjoy but it’s questionable wether there are any results at the end of it, the time just runs away from me, I have tried to time box it, and going forward I am going to set an amount of time to work on design and stick to it. I also had a play with some new tech, astro, cronitor and html.

I did pick up cronitor this week and implemented in some of the cloud flare worker jobs I have, I really like it, I have looked at other metrics and logging solutions before and they are pretty overwhelming, I’ve used new relic quite a bit and that’s a beast, cronitor is really simple and easy to use, I am just posting to endpoint, they have lots of sdks in different languages but for my use case it was easier to just use their telemetry endpoint directly.

It also supports website monitoring, I get a nice view that everything is running correctly, it also has a generous free tier so I have not had to stump up yet.

I also had a go at astro js, a newish javascript web framework, I wrote a little about that here.

I also had a jump on the HTMX bandwagon, If you don’t know what HTMX is, its tagline is

“high power tools for html”

which is kind of accurate I guess, but its essentially a javascript library that helps you to use less javascript or even no javascript, by add attributes to your html elements and returning html from the server you can get a whole bunch of interactivity through htmx as it will respond to these attributes load data through “Ajax” and update the DOM, it can do a whole ton of things though, handle forms, polls for data and even server sent events.

I created a small demo using Hono a little javascript server framework, according to its website is

“a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for the Edges”

I use cloud flare to deploy my applications and hono supports workers in a nice way by giving you access to bindings like your key value store or R2 file store or any other binding in cloud flare workers. It also supports jsx like syntax for building html, ideal for htmx as it expects html not json, it only took a few minutes to get a working example, I’d like to explore HTMX more and see how other people are using, how are they dealing with authentication and breaking out the javascript when needed, I’m sure there are some common patterns there.