HTMX in Action How to Build a Lightweight Signup Form

HTMX in Action: How to Build a Lightweight Signup Form

Chris Sonnenberg HTML5, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Creating dynamic, responsive web forms doesn’t have to be complicated. With HTMX, you can build a seamless signup form using just a few HTML enhancements. In this blog, I’m going to show how to make a basic signup form with HTMX.

We’ll cover how a few minor improvements to HTML allow us to make a simple form quickly while keeping state consistent. There will be only three sections to the form, but it’s easily extendable with changes in only one or two routes per change.

Using Keyboard Indicator LEDs to communicate in Morse Code with C

Your Keyboard as an Output Device?

Luke Zeisset Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Though we don’t really see as many of them as we used to, they are still with us. One helps indicate if a 10-key is in number or cursor mode. Another helps show when we use capital letters without holding the shift key. You might even have another to show if you accidentally hit the scroll lock key. I’m talking of course about keyboard state indicators.

Most people only think of a keyboard as an output device, but given that it has a changeable state, it most definitely can be used for output as well! Unfortunately, producing meaningful output using a keyboard state indicator (beyond their intended purpose) is rather tedious because they only have two states; the indicator light is either on or off. And to convolute things further, most keyboards these days don’t have many indicators in general. For example, the very keyboard I’m typing on only has a caps lock indicator! Thankfully, there is a well-established encoding that requires only one “bit” to be useful: Morse code!

In this article, I will show how I approached the development of a small utility to output Morse code on the caps lock LED. Even if it’s impractical, I wanted a challenge, and I had fun working through it. Though I’m certainly not an expert, I used the C programming language because I figured it would be the simplest approach.

I hope it is as clear to you, the reader, as it is to me, especially since I tried to make this as simple as possible. And don’t worry if you don’t have a caps lock indicator, either, as we will display the Morse code, too.

Dockerizing an MSSQL Server (header image)

Dockerizing an MSSQL Server: Unlocking Flexibility

Alex Cassells Articles, Databases, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, SQL, SQL Server, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Docker is a pretty magical tool that streamlines server and environment setup while helping to eliminate the operating system and software version variables. It’s one of the best ways to mitigate the classic ‘Works on my machine!’ obstacle many developers run into when sharing or promoting their code.

When a lot of people think of Docker, the last thing they think of is Microsoft or Windows. It took many years for Docker to even officially support Windows. As a .NET developer, I always wanted the stability that Docker offers, and today, I can have it. In the post below, I’ll dive into how to dockerize an MSSQL Server.

Unlock the Power of Collapsible Text in Flutter

Flutter Essentials: Strategies for Collapsible Text in Flutter

Rachel Walker Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Flutter, Mobile, Tutorial 1 Comment

As a mobile developer, I have had to create a lot of listing pages. The content, styling, and layout may all differ, but structurally, they are the same. When I first started using Flutter, I was immediately impressed by how fast they are to stand up. Nearly out of the box, the ListView and the Card work extremely well and support a wide variety of devices and use cases with no additional styling – all while remaining extensible.

With this in mind, when I needed to create a listing page that displayed variable lengths of pre-generated text that could be expanded and collapsed, I was not particularly concerned about the complexity of the task. However, I very quickly realized that Flutter is less optimized for handling large blocks of text than it is for displaying lists. I quickly encountered unexpected complexities that I had to manually account for. In this post, I’ll walk through the basic structure and explore which components can be used for solving this problem and creating collapsible text in Flutter.