For each color had to pick the color inside of Affinity Designer, copy the hex code, open the color dialog on Piskel, paste the code and press enter. If you want to transfer a lot of colors, this can get a little bit annoying.

The good thing: Piskel is an Open Source web project. That means with a little effort I could solve this problem for me. Because I know, there is a native color control which has a picker which works across the whole screen (atleast in Chromium browsers): <input type="color">

Great. Now I needed to bring this to the Piskel application and make it overwrite the current color. I tried to find some kind of a state in the JavaScript code I could use. Because Piskel’s source code is on GitHub, I could just clone the project to my machine and search through the code. Because I know from the User Interface that the main color is called “primary color” I was searching for “primary”. And voila, I found an event called "SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR". Sounds like exactly what I need. Now I needed to know how to trigger this event. So I was searching for where "SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR" is used in the code and this is what I found:

$.publish(Events.SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR, [color])

Nice, looks like I could just use something like $.publish("SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR", "#ff00ff"). I tested it in the browser console and it worked! I now also used the console to put the color input element to the HTML document and passed an event listener when the input is changed:

const colorInput = 
  document.createElement("input")

colorInput.id = "lgkColorInput"
colorInput.className = "tool-icon"
colorInput.title = "Native color picker"
colorInput.type = "color"

// The tools container of Piskel's UI
document.getElementById("tools-container")
  .append(colorInput)

document.getElementById("lgkColorInput")
  .addEventListener(
    "input", 
    ({currentTarget}) => {
      $.publish("SELECT_PRIMARY_COLOR", 
      currentTarget.value)
    }
  )

It looks great, like it was always part of the UI. I found the "tool-icon" class name, because all other tool buttons use it too.

Awesome, but everything I run on the browser console is just temporary, so I needed a way to always execute it when I’m on Piskel. The good thing; there is a browser extension for this: Custom JavaScript for Websites 2
I installed it, pasted my code in and it works!

So if you would like to my new tool aswell, just install the extension and paste in my code and it should work. ^^

Probably the worst nightmare a blog maintainer could think of, happened to me. I deleted the database of this blog, by accident of course.
I actually was about to remove unused databases on my webspace, but looks like I deleted a wrong one. I didn’t even notice it myself, Felix by HelloCoding.de told me my blog is not available (so thanks again for letting me know ).

Gladly I had a backup of the database. It’s from December 2021, so all the newer posts were gone. But I also had some posts on my local machine, so I could atleast import some of the newer posts. Because only the database got erased, all images and theme were still there. Some links to the images are still broken. I will fix them in the next days I guess. ^^

You can see it on the sub-domain, I later called my project “Skip it!” and it is a card game you can play anywhere. On your phone, on your computer and on your tablet. If you know the card game “Skip-Bo”, you could probably guess, how you can play my game. I chose to create a clone of Skip-Bo because I sometimes play it with my family and also enjoyed playing the iPad app a while ago. Through the iPad app I found out how addicting and fun the game can be and the game-play might be simple enough to create it with my skills in web technologies.

The developer experience using SvelteKit and Svelte was awesome! For years I primarily use React for my projects. I actually felt a little nostalgic, because I wrote actual HTML again, instead of JSX (no more className) and handling states is way more straightforward. I also use Svelte’s feature for scoped stylesheets. In previous projects I normally use SCSS and create global stylesheets. In Skip it! I switched to component-scoped architecture. Benefit is, you automatically just keep CSS, you will actually use, because the code-editor will underline unused CSS rules.

Right now you can play against 3 players. I also thought about if you could play against real players. There are multiple ways to realise such realtime actions. Maybe I will implement it next holidays.

But I think it’s not too late to still write a little post about it.

The goal: make the blog look like the rest of lgk.io

The blog runs with WordPress and now with a new child theme of the preinstalled Twenty Twenty-One, I just called „Twenty Twenty-One LGK“. In the past I used a theme I totally created myself, it was called „Winegum“. It’s still available on GitHub (https://github.com/lgkonline/Winegum1), but I really don’t recommend to use it anymore. It’s very outdated not compatible with modern WordPress features and third-party plugins. It might also be better for security reasons to use a theme, which is activity maintained. That’s why I switched to Twenty Twenty-One.

I used the color customisation options of the theme to make it match better with my portfolio site. That was the first step to the current look of the blog. From there I created my child theme and replaced parts of the theme, most important part is the header.

By the way: my portfolio site and this blog are running on completely different technologies. The blog is a PHP-server-rendered WordPress site and my portfolio is a React Single-Page-Application. So my task was to bring the header of my React app to the WordPress theme and make it look as seamless as possible.

I’m pretty happy with the result. When you switch between „Blog“ and „Start“ for example, you are switching between two totally separated sites, hopefully without mentioning it. The blog uses the same colors and the same font now.

The new search bar

One thing was still missing on the new theme: a search bar. But hey, better late than never, right? It’s now there too!

This was actually a more difficult because I had to use some JavaScript here. I started coding the search bar on my portfolio and then brought it to the blog theme as a small React app only for the search bar. The search bar is just executing a simple WordPress search request (/?s=my+request). Right now, the request only shows results from my blog. It would be awesome, to also show results from my portfolio site. Maybe I will bring that in the future when I have time. ^^

With Photopea you can open, edit and save many different formats like .PSD, .AI, .XD and .sketch. Right in your browser, for free. So it might be perfect if Adobe’s subscription model is too expensive for you. With browsers like Chrome or Edge you can even install Photopea as a PWA on your desktop, so it will act like a native app. Then you even have direct access to files on your machine.

Because it’s free, you’ll see some ads on the side. If you want to remove it, you can spend a little money.

To have a dark mode is a more and more common thing. But it can be pretty tricky.

Lea Verou wrote an awesome article how you can handle this task with CSS and custom properties in a pretty nice way:

Dark mode in 5 minutes, with inverted lightness variables – Lea Verou

I already followed that guide for my latest web project.

Auf der Website bekommst du auch einen guten Eindruck, was sich geändert hat. Unter anderem neue Formen und neue Animationen.

Was ich am spannendsten finde: dynamische Farben.

Google hat in Android 12 ein Algorithmus integriert, der Farbtöne aus dem Wallpaper der Nutzer:innen extrahiert, die vom UI verwendet werden können. So bekommen die Apps eine persönlichere Note.

Ich habe kein Android-Gerät, deswegen konnte ich das Feature noch nicht selbst ausprobieren.

Umsetzung für Webseiten?

Bisher ist Material You hauptsächlich für Android vorgesehen, es wird aber eine Frage der Zeit sein, dass auch an Web gedacht wird. Webseiten haben keine direkte Möglichkeit, den Wallpaper vom Betriebssystem abzugreifen.

Möglicherweise wird Google für Chrome die Theme-Farben als CSS-Variablen liefern, sodass Webentwickler:innen diese einfach nutzen können. Andere Chromium-Browser (wie Edge) könnten diese API dann ebenfalls erhalten.

Übergangslösung

Ich habe ein wenig experimentiert und Farben aus dem Standard-Wallpaper aus macOS Monterey mit Hilfe von Adobe Color extrahiert.

Den Dark Mode habe ich ebenfalls berücksichtigt:

In nächsten Schritten könnte man mit JavaScript herausfinden, welches Betriebssystem verwendet wird und jeweils Farben der Standard-Wallpaper anwenden.

Oder man erlaubt, Benutzer:innen ein Bild zum Analysieren hochzuladen/auszuwählen. Das halte ich allerdings für einen nicht sehr eleganten Ansatz.

Innerhalb eines Projekts ist es auf jeden Fall angenehm, überall die gleiche Formatierung zu haben. Das sorgt für eine bessere Übersicht und befriedigt nebenbei den inneren Monk.
Arbeitet man mit mehreren Personen an einem Projekt, kannst du entweder regelmäßig von Hand den Code der anderen formatieren oder du lässt es machen, automatisch!

Installiere Prettier

Das geht mit dem Tool Prettier! Du legst zuvor in einer Config-Datei (.prettierrc.json) die Regeln fest (Semikolons ja/nein, maximale Zeilenlänge etc.) und führst dann Prettier aus. In einer separaten Datei (.prettierignore) kannst du noch definieren, welche Ordner und Dateien dabei unangetastet bleiben sollen.

Folge einfach dem offiziellen Guide, um Prettier bei dir einzurichten: Install · Prettier

Prettier bei jedem Git Commit ausführen

Du kannst Prettier jedes Mal manuell ausführen oder dafür eine Extension in deinem Code-Editor installieren. Ich finde es allerdings angenehmer, dass Prettier automatisch vor jedem Git Commit ausgeführt wird. So wird sichergestellt, dass kein unschöner Code nach GitHub gelangt (oder wo auch immer du Git hostest). Auch funktioniert das ganze dann unabhängig davon, welchen Code-Editor du oder Team-Kolleg:innen verwenden.

Ich bin einfach den Abschnitt “Git hooks” gefolgt: Install · Prettier

Das Tool “Husky” sorgt also dafür, dass Prettier vor jedem Git Commit-Befehl ausgeführt wird und der Code formatiert wird.

Meine bevorzugten Einstellungen

Meine .prettierrc.json-Datei sieht so aus:

{
    "tabWidth": 4,
    "useTabs": false,
    "semi": false,
    "singleQuote": false,
    "trailingComma": "none",
    "bracketSpacing": true,
    "bracketSameLine": false,
    "fluid": false
}

• Zur Einrückung werden 4 Leerzeichen verwendet.
• Ich nutze keine Semikolons (bei JavaScript und TypeScript).
• Ich nutze doppelte Anführungszeichen bei Strings (").
• Keine Kommata, wo es nicht notwendig ist (z.B. in TypeScript Interfaces).
• Leerzeichen um geschweifte Klammern ({ foo: bar }).
• Für bracketSameLine siehe: https://prettier.io/docs/en/options.html#bracket-line

Was du in .prettierignore reinschreibst, ist stark von deinem jeweiligem Projekt abhängig. Grundsätzlich sollte da alles rein, was kompiliert wird (vielleicht build-Ordner).

Before the update:

After the update:

I now use display: grid; to show the latest blog post link next to my introduction card. This way, I waste less space and the user can see more, the links to the featured apps are visible again on the first view. ^^

I also like the new blog post view, I now show the thumbnail image of the post in the background.

Of course the grid view is designed mobile-first. On mobile, the introduction card and the blog post will be just underneath each other.