Social Networks for the life of the world
Writing a WordPress plugin I had to dig around to figure out maintenance mode. That’s when visitors get this message. Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute. It’s easy to do from plugin or theme code. To enter maintenance mode Write a file named .maintenance into your document root with something like … Read more
The New York Times ran an article last Friday about the struggles people have had using all those vaccination-appointment web sites. The biggest complaint? The sites “crash” because they have too much traffic. I’ve worked at a company that runs scaled-up web technology. We have a customer with a vast seasonal rush, with millions of … Read more
You’re developing a web app on localhost. It uses one of the many Web APIs that require your page to come from an https origin (or from localhost). getUserMedia(), WebRTC, and the Web Authentication API are examples. The hard way Now you want to show it to a friend. Now what? Do you have to … Read more
The Firefox browser’s WebRTC and MediaRecorder functionality can handle H.264 (Advanced Video Codec) coding and decoding, but only with H.264’s constrained baseline profile. Other, higher, profiles just don’t work. And in Firefox’s WebRTC implementation (v87) attempts to use higher profiles fail more-or-less silently. Firefox works around all the patent issues with H.264 by using an … Read more
The WebRTC (browser-to-browser realtime conferencing) standard landed as a W3C recommendation version 1.0 on 26-January-2021. Thanks everybody who worked on it! Maybe there’s a future without adapter.js !
There’s a sweet little function in web browsers called the Web Beacon API. It’s a simplified version of the XHR or Fetch API that does a fire-and-forget POST operation to a server. It’s nice for a few reasons. First, browser Javascript (front-end Javascript) can use it without any need to process results coming back. Just … Read more
Working with browser Javascript on mobile devices, I found myself needing to report exceptions back to a server. (It’s hard to see the browser console log on a mobile device without connecting it to a desktop machine). Here’s what I did to make a suitable object that can be serialized. To use this you’ll need … Read more
In the last section, we populated our us_counties table and used it for some queries. Now it’s time to create some views of the data. With views we’ll be able to do more interesting things without retyping huge queries. We can use views as a foundation for more analysis. The first view we need is … Read more
Back in the Database Programming section of this series, we created the view named us_counties_new, showing the daily new case load. Recall that we first computed the seven-day running average of the total case loads in the us_counties_avg7 view, then used those numbers for the daily case loads. Having the daily case loads available lets … Read more
The Times’s data is here. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties.csv If you’re using a browser, open the context menu (right-click) on that link and use the Save Link As … operation to put it into a file on your system. We’ll use it later to load the database. Use your database interface program to log in to your database … Read more
