Managing drafts in Jekyll while writing blog posts

The conventional wisdom of maintaining draft posts in Jekyll is to store them in _drafts directory. Drafts are posts without a date in the filename. They’re posts you’re still working on and don’t want to publish yet. To get up and running with drafts, create a _drafts folder in your...

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How to allow Ping (ICMP) requests through the Windows Firewall

The ping.exe is a great tool provided by the Windows operating system to check and ensure if we are connected to another computer located across the Internet or even our own local LAN through the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol). However, it often happens that even if the remote machine...

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How I made my web pages load 10x faster

Update: As of 17th June, 2024, I have also started using font-awesome and google-fonts which goes directly against my principle of “no-cruft”! And while the point of this article still stands in theory, I came to learn that there are pragmatic limits to how far you can stretch minimalism. At...

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The power of minimalism: Why ecommerce and corporate websites need to de-clutter

In the digital age, ecommerce and corporate websites often overwhelm users with cluttered designs and excessive elements. But as consumers gravitate toward simplicity, adopting a minimalist approach can not only improve user experience but also enhance site performance. Here’s why minimalism is the future of web design. Why Minimalism Matters...

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"API first" apps are the future

Apps tend to become very complex beasts, especially when they start to scale. Part of the complexity is due to the fact that the users could be a diverse set of people with multitude of tastes and preferences which could all be conflicting. A classic example here is this recent...

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Kiwixotherapy: A weird but working therapy for introverts suffering from sleeplessness

If you’re an introvert who is suffering from both sleeplessness and also low self-esteem or impostor syndrome, I want to suggest you this therapy which I recently landed upon myself and seen many people recover from their insomnia or sleeplessness problem using it, and leading much happier and energized days...

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How to handle long-polling of XHR requests in PHP

A common need you often face in PHP scripting these days is writing a long-polling endpoint for things like sending notifications or other kinds of responses back to the client. While using something dedicated like node, cometd or websocket makes ideal sense for such things, there are use-cases when you...

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Common sense keyword research: the quickest way to find niche ideas for free

Of late, I’ve found that a lot of unnecessary time and effort is being wasted on keyword-research activity by most new bloggers. Most bloggers do keyword research primarily for finding a niche i.e. they try to find a (relatively low-competition) topic related to their own where opportunity to rank is...

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How to handle multiple queries in SQLite using CodeIgniter

My earlier article dealt with multi-query issues of MySQL, this one is dedicated to SQLITE. Multi-queries are often discouraged to begin with but there are times when you find yourself using them. One typical use case is populating the database initially when it’s empty. You do this by running an...

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From userscript to Chrome extension: say goodbye to Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey

Userscripts are a very useful and handy tool in the hands of power users. Just like customized garnishing, salt and pepper, etc. we put on our food before we eat, we can add custom javascript tweaks on the websites we visit. For example, you may want Reddit to automatically highlight...

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