Doing my federal (US) taxes this year, I was finding myself unable to create an account on the Free Fillable Forms site. I kept getting kicked back to the start after filling out and submitting my information. This Reddit thread led me to figure out that it was related to my T-Mobile Home Internet. I turned that off and turned on my phone hotspot and used that to get in. My phone is also T-Mobile, but apparently different enough to not have that issue. Later, I was able to get back in with my Home Internet, so it seems to be just related to something on that initial registration process.
web posts
Server upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04
My server was on Ubuntu 20.04, but due to the end-of-life of that LTS version next month, I have upgraded to 22.04. My server is managed with Vagrant / Ansible. My plan had been to do a new local VM on the newer version, get it working properly with Ansible, then set up a new server with it and migrate over. However, since Ubuntu isn’t releasing an official Vagrant box for 24.04 and beyond, I don’t think it makes sense to take that path. I may move over to Debian or look into Vagrant alternatives, but to get this done before EOL, I decided to just try a do-release-upgrade to upgrade the existing server in place.
In Mac OS Sonoma, browsers now require and the OS will ask for the “Local Network” permission to access local websites. I didn’t know why it was asking and didn’t allow it, but then couldn’t access my sites. I had to go to “System Settings”, the “Privacy & Security” pane, select “Local Network” and turn on for my browser(s) to get access again.
If it matters, my local dev setup uses domains set in /etc/hosts pointing to IPs of VMs run by VirtualBox, managed by Vagrant, set up like web.vm.network 'private_network', ip: '192.168.56.1'.
Also annoying with T-Mobile, their “post-paid” account site seems to be pretty broken in Firefox.
Continue reading post "#4102"Inline emoji favicon
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On a simple one-page site, I wanted as much as possible to be inline in the single document request. I didn’t have a favicon, and I didn’t want browsers to make that extra request. I considered just adding an empty file, as I’ve done sometimes in the past, but that would still be an extra request. So I looked up if it could be inlined. It can be done, with a data URL. And using an SVG format, an emoji can be used for a cheap actual icon.
Continue reading post "Inline emoji favicon"Upgraded Symfony 4.4 to 5.4
I’ve upgraded my website to Symfony 5.4 from 4.4. I’ve continued on without Symfony Flex, as I had when updating from 3.4 to 4.4. The procedure was fairly similar to that, fixing any Symfony 4 deprecations and then updating the composer version constraints, fixing anything broken after that. I also switched from requiring the symfony/symfony repo to requiring individual components. It went fairly smoothly, aside from needing to fix a few things after the composer update.
Ansible, Vagrant, and Symfony `var` permissions
I have moved to using VirtualBox VM’s for my local web development. I use Vagrant and Ansible to set them up. For my site, I use synced folders to share the site files from the local machine to the dev VM. This limits what permissions can be set on the files though, and doesn’t work well for Symfony’s var folder stuff, eg cache and logs. The normal Symfony permissions for those folders use ACL’s, but those cannot be set on Vagrant synced files. My solution was to create a /var/www/var folder to store such folders for any sites on the VM, and symlink them into place in the shared folder location. I did this with Ansible so that it would be reproducible. Since I ran into some issues getting it working, I thought I’d blog about it.
Vagrant network IP change
Apparently, an update to VirtualBox after version 6.1.26 limited the IP’s usable for network adapters on Mac / Linux hosts. They must now be in the 192.68.56.0/21 range, which is pretty limited and much less easy to remember or type than the 10.*.*.* that I had been using. I had to change my projects to all be in this range and spread out the IPs to avoid collisions between the various projects when I updated VirtualBox a while back.
Ideas: Cascading Behavior Sheets, a declarative alternative to JS
I have had the idea for some time that the web ought to have a declarative format to define behavior on elements like it does for styles (CSS). It would be an alternative to JavaScript (JS) that would be as robust as CSS, simplifying adding and defining common behaviors. There are a lot of things sites do frequently that can take a fair amount of work for a new person to implement, as well as require a payload sent over the wire. For people who don’t need complications beyond standard, this could be provided by the browser with some configuration in a simple sheet. I think there should be a Cascading Behavior Sheet (CBS) standard for the web.
Potential advantages:
- robust forward and backward compatibility like CSS
- simpler, easier to learn format than JS
- little to write or think about for common functionality
- little to send over wire for common functionality
- more performant native implementation possible
- declarative
- familiar syntax to CSS devs
- simple to connect behavior broadly to chosen selectors
- cascade,
@media,@support, etc to limit which and when behaviors apply - automatic handling of attaching and removing behaviors when they apply / don’t, including new DOM elements
- maintain separation of concerns that keeping JS and CSS separate provides
Porkbun has moved to Cloudflare for providing their DNS service. That is fine with me after they had an outage earlier in the year: Cloudflare DNS is pretty reliable.
Continue reading post "#3891"