Matthew Lang

My wife is thinking of setting up a Facebook account so that she can book in for a fitness class she likes and keep up to date with the kid’s school information.

Crazy, right?

Yes, Facebook will be the single way that my wife will be able to register for the fitness class in the future and yes Facebook is the only channel that the school regularly updates despite having a website and two native apps.

Frustrating? Definitely.

There’s a section of people that still see Facebook as the “default service of the Internet”. Facebook is probably easy to set up but other than that the only perceived benefit it has for these organisations is the numbers. They think most people are on Facebook, so they use Facebook.

Facebook is a crux technology and not a good one at that. The Internet has many tools for organisations to communicate and engage with audiences. So, why do so many organisations turn to Facebook?

I don’t know the exact reason why. It could be that organisations find it easy to use and they think that everyone else is using it. It’s true that most people are using Facebook, but it’s not everyone that’s using it.

It’s not Facebook that’s the problem, it’s the view that Facebook is the only way of communicating with audiences. 

How do you change that when the majority of people see Facebook as the only way of using the Internet?

Nicholas Bate has the steps you need to start that novel.

I’m not surprised it’s being suggested by Trump that they need to arm teachers in schools.

Rather than making schools safe areas to learn, aren’t they just going to be turned into places where kids fear for their lives? Arming teachers is one thing, but in the heat of the moment, can armed teachers react in the same way that the police should?

John Gruber also linked to an article describing the devasting effect of AR-15 bullets on the organs.

More guns is not the answer.

It’s been a while since I dabbled in a bit of JavaScript. It’s not that I don’t like programming in JavaScript, it is growing on me, it’s just I’ve never found a real use case for it in a web application. The thing about JavaScript though is that there are so many great frameworks available that mean you often don’t have to write any of the curly bracket stuff.

Vue.js has been on my radar for a while but what has really grabbed my interest has been the release of Stimulus.

For a lot of web applications I work on, I don’t want to re-write a whole view for a particular framework, I just want to enhance a part of that view. Both the above mentioned frameworks do this, but I decided to try and use Stimulus with a web application of my own just for fun.

The copy to clipboard is a nice example to start from in the Stimulus handbook and so I started with this basic example by adding a copy to clipboard button when displaying a writing prompt in PenMuse. Not only was it good to broaden my reach beyond the Rails code that I am used to writing, I also got to experiment with WebPacker as well.

The final results are good and there was a few hiccups along the way in trying to copy the prompt from an input element that didn’t interfere with the user interface.

I did at one point create an input elemement on the fly to copy the prompt from when the button was pressed, but it jerked the screen up and down on tablet devices as it was copying the prompt. Horrible.

I decided to settle on using an input group so that you can partially see the prompt being copied. It’s not ideal, but it’s working and it doesn’t mess with the screen in anyway on different devices.

I’ve still got some adjustments to make for smaller devices like stacking the buttons on the home page so that they appear as a column but that will come later in the week.