javascript

Keep connection alive by periodically fetching content

The IT admin at dad’s office is a meanie. All users are connected to the intranet by default. They have some sort of login-thing for internet access where each user has to login from their computer with their credentials in order to get connected to the internet. And if a user doesn’t visit a webpage for more than 5 minutes, they get automatically logged out. And running downloads don’t count, so even if my dad has a download going, he gets disconnected if he doesn’t visit/reload a page once every five minutes.

Fixed divs and zooming on mobile

..are two things that are just not meant to be used together, at least as far as I can tell based on personal experience and several questions on Stack Overflow. You can normally account for the mobile viewport’s or browser window’s size/zoom level by the use of CSS media queries, but those don’t work at all when using pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices. For example, here are three screenshots of an in-progress layout of this site that uses a fixed div for a sidebar, as viewed on a desktop browser.

Fixes to poet

So, I moved this website over to poet recently for the sole purpose of making it easier for me to publish posts right from Emacs (by writing the posts in a simple markdown file in a local git repo, and the pushing the changes over to my server and staging them). However, right off the bat I ran into a couple of issues. Poet comes with a feature that allows it to monitor your posts directory for any changes, and then it reloads all posts the moment it detects any new files/modifications to existing files/deletion of files.