Alex MacArthur

What I Like About Astro

What Stuck Out While Migrating My Blog from Next.js to Astro

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How to Lazy Load Disqus for Improved Site Performance

I’ve been a vocal opponent of using Disqus for a number of reasons, one of which being what it does to the performance of your website. It’s actually one of the reasons I built an alternative. Despite that, it’s a widely used service that won’t be

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Keep Using Disqus if You Don’t Care About SEO, Performance, and User Privacy

I remember when I first started to get a little more serious about blogging. It was with a statically generated Gatsby site, with posts stored in flat Markdown files, and deployed on Netlify. I loved it. But I knew it was still missing something I wanted: a way for readers

When I Actually Needed useLayoutEffect() in React

If you’ve worked with React for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of the infamous useLayoutEffect() hook. You’ve also probably never used it. That’s because for most cases, useEffect() covers the vast majority of use cases with a much lower chance of shooting yourself in

Serving Notion Presigned Images with Cloudflare Workers

I recently made a pretty big change on my website. For the first time ever, my posts don’t live in Markdown files. Instead, they’re all in Notion, the tool I’ve been using to draft posts for quite some time now. It’s nice being able to have

I’ve Boarded the SSG Train Again

If you haven’t noticed, we’re in a bit of a server-rendered resurgence right now. It seems like the heyday of the Jamstack, and more specifically, static site generation (SSG) is behind us, and the pendulum is once again swinging toward more traditional paradigms. Namely: HTML that’s generated

Why Can’t You .forEach() Over Empty Array Items?

Harken back to a time when you needed to execute some code a specific number of times and had some reason to not use a for loop. You might’ve made a fresh array with a certain number of items, and then attempted to .forEach() over it: const freshArray = new

Develop an SPA Against a Remote Page w/ Vite

There are serious benefits to building small applications in the context of a complex, remote page. Vite makes it pretty simple to pull it off.

Evading Goodhart’s Law in My Personal Life

A few months ago, I stumbled across Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. An example: The owner of a business wants his company to become a reputable brand on Twitter. To get there, he begins rewarding his social team for

Reminding Myself that Maps Store Objects by Reference Too

No matter how many times I revisit it, I have pretty consistent track record of being tripped up by how JavaScript assigns values to variables. Primitives: Assigned by Value Primitive values (numbers, strings, etc.) are assigned by value, meaning that assigning one variable to another variable assigned to a primitive

I Have Zero Regrets Moving from Google Analytics to Plausible

After years of relying on Google Analytics, I've found an alternative that values what I do: performance, privacy, and data ownership.

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Reliably Send an HTTP Request as a User Leaves a Page

A post on CSS Tricks exploring why HTTP requests sent during page navigation are at risk of abandonment, as well as options available to prevent it from happening.

Programmatically Create a Static Page in WordPress

It’s surprisingly a big pain to create a route and render a static template in WordPress without messing with the database. For example, let’s say you’d like to create a static “/error” page, and there’s no desire to have any of the content editable. You just

My Three Favorite Reasons to Get a Credit Card and Why They’re All Inadequate

I’ve lived without a credit card for a decade now. Life hasn’t been hard without one. With a debit card (backed by my money I actually have) readily available and accepted anywhere a credit card is, I wouldn’t even say it’s been inconvenient. Even so, more

Passing Variables to Markdown Files in Gatsby

All of the documentation and a few miscellaneous text blobs you see on typeitjs.com are sourced from Markdown files built using Gatsby’s gatsby-transformer-remark plugin. Sprinkled throughout the content are several references to the current published version of the library (ex: v8.0.7). When a new version is

Conditionally Rendering ERB Templates from Different Directories with Ruby on Rails

A while back, I was working in a Ruby on Rails project in which we wanted to test out different versions of features within our application, most of which were housed in separate ERB partials. For each feature, there’d be a default “experience”, but when a certain condition was

When a JavaScript WeakMap() Actually Came in Handy

Back when I was working on slide-element, I noticed an issue that would occur when I rapidly toggled an element open & closed. If the previous animation wasn’t allowed to finish, the new one would eventually get outta whack, clipping the content on subsequent animations. The Cause of the

Build Your Own WordPress Plugin Update Server with a Serverless Function

A while ago, I wrote a premium WordPress plugin for creating typewriter effects with TypeIt via shortcode or Gutenblock. I was ill-prepared for the trickiness of managing plugin updates for such a plugin. Since a premium plugin is monetized, it can’t live inside the WordPress Plugin Repository like free

The Time I (Sorta) Had a Real Use Case for a Bitwise Operator in Client-Side JavaScript

There’s a certain number of JavaScript features that I’ve never really used and find highly intimidating. Bitwise operators are among them. These operators exist for manipulating binary representations of data, and for the type of work I usually do, I’ve never met a scenario when I’ve

Set Up a Quick & Dirty FTP Server on DigitalOcean

A project of mine recently needed a simple FTP server that can give multiple different users access to the contents of specific directories (and only those directories). My technical requirements were stupid simple, the data I’d be dealing with wasn’t sensitive, and I wanted to avoid paying for

Bullets, Cannonballs, and Web Components

Guidelines for Pushing the Technological Envelope While Validating New Business Ventures

Deploying WordPress to WP Engine with GitHub Actions and Composer

It’s difficult to overstate the value of GitHub Actions in automating tasks we previously had to perform manually – deploying WordPress sites included. Recently, I was tasked with setting up a WordPress repository to automatically deploy to a WP Engine environment whenever a commit is made to a particular branch.

When DOM Updates Appear to Be Asynchronous

Imagine we have some JavaScript on a page that updates an element’s contents and immediately logs those contents out: <span id="element"> original text </span> <script> document.getElementById('element').innerHTML = "updated text"; console.log(element.innerHTML); <

Why I Like Tailwind CSS

And a Couple of Challenges I've Seen Too

Don't Feel Bad About Using XMLHttpRequest

A while back, I began contributing to a small JavaScript library responsible for sending a POST request with some data to an endpoint. At the time, it used axios to make that request, and I wanted to simplify things by shedding a dependency. The obvious alternative was fetch – modern, native,