This post sets out how Feroz and I tried to book a trip for a very short amount of time using as little money as possible. Look out for some live-progress tweets on Saturday the 7th of May for how we are getting on.
A couple of the recent projects I’ve worked on have both had similar stylesheet problems. They have both misused the tilde selector, which has gone unnoticed and been the cause of numerous bouts of CSS bloat. You may well have come across this selector before. After all it’s a selector that’s been in the CSS spec for a long time, even IE7 supports it. Its purpose is to select all matching adjacent siblings.
A project I worked on in some of my spare time back in Summer 2015 was to look for unusual HTTP headers. Things like X-Clacks-Overhead:GNU Terry Pratchett, or ancient use of PICS-label headers. I recently revisited the project and put it online as popular-headers.
Markdown is an easy to use markup language for formatting text. It has proved to be very popular with developers. The syntax is small, quick to learn and very readable. The format is fairly well supported by online tools. Thinking of just a few examples off-hand: GitHub, MediaWiki and Trello. When you are writing a lot of text, particular web content, markdown makes it easy to see and focus on the content, rather than a mess of HTML tags.
Docker allows software and dependencies to be bundled together in ‘containers’. This is a whole level up from a script that installs the libraries for a piece of software to run. A container holds the full environment in its own file system. This means anything you can install/setup on a server can be bundled in the container. The big advantage here is that we then have a portable unit which can be run consistently from machine to machine. Think of Docker as lighter-weight than a VM (e.g. Docker containers don’t have their own kernels, where as a VM would), but giving a similar level of separation, structure and consistency.