I love Puppeteer - it lets me play around with the ideas of The Headless Web - that is running the web in a browser without a visible browser and even build tools like DOM-curl (Curl that runs JavaScript). Specifically I love scripting the browser to scrape, manipulate and interact with pages.

One demo I wanted to make was inspired by Ire's Capturing 422 live images post where she ran a puppeteer script that would navigate to many pages and take a screenshot. Instead of going to many pages, I wanted to take many screenshots of elements on the page.

The problem that I have with Puppeteer is the opening stanza that you need to do anything. Launch, Open tab, navigate - it's not complex, it's just more boilerplate than I want to create for simple scripts. That's why I created Puppeteer Go. It's just a small script that helps me build CLI utilities easily that opens the browser, navigates to a page, performs your action and then cleans up after itself.

Check it out.

const { go } = require('puppeteer-go');

go('https://paul.kinlan.me', async (page) => {
    const elements = await page.$$("h1");
    let count = 0;
    for(let element of elements) {
      try {
        await element.screenshot({ path: `${count++}.png`});
      } catch (err) {
        console.log(count, err);
      }
    }
});

The above code will find the h1 element in my blog and take a screenshot. This is nowhere near as good as Ire's work, but I thought it was neat to see if we can quickly pull screenshots from canisuse.com directly from the page.

const { go } = require('puppeteer-go');

go('https://caniuse.com/#search=css', async (page) => {
    const elements = await page.$$("article.feature-block.feature-block--feature");
    let count = 0;
    for(let element of elements) {
      try {
        await element.screenshot({ path: `${count++}.png`});
      } catch (err) {
        console.log(count, err);
      }
    }
});

Enjoy!

I really like EditorJS. It's let me create a very simple web-hosted interface for my static Hugo blog.

EditorJS has most of what I need in a simple block-based editor. It has a plugin for headers, code, and even a simple way to add images to the editor without requiring hosting infrastructure. It doesn't have a simple way to add video's to the editor, until now.

I took the simple-image plugin repository and changed it up (just a tad) to create a simple-video plugin (npm module). Now I can include videos easily in this blog.

If you are familar with EditorJS, it's rather simple to include in your projects. Just install it as follows

npm i simple-video-editorjs

And then just include it in your project as you see fit.

const SimpleVideo = require('simple-video-editorjs');

var editor = EditorJS({
  ...
  
  tools: {
    ...
    video: SimpleVideo,
  }
  
  ...
});

The editor has some simple options that let you configure how the video should be hosted in the page:

1. Autoplay - will the video play automatically when the page loads
2. muted - will the video not have sound on by default (needed for autoplay)
3. controls - will the video have the default HTML controls.

Below is a quick example of a video that is embedded (and showing some of the options).

Anyway, I had fun creating this little plugin - it was not too hard to create and about the only thing that I did was defer the conversion to base64 which simple-images uses and instead just use the Blob URLs.

I've got some ideas for projects that make it easier to create sites on the web - one of the ideas is to make a netlify-like drag and drop interface for zeit based projects (I like zeit but it requires a tiny bit of cli magic to deploy).

This post covers just one small piece of the puzzle: creating project names.

Glitch is a good example of this, when you create a project it gives it a whimsical randomly generated name. The team also created a good dictionary of fairly safe words that combine well (and if you want they have a simple server to host).

So, the side project this Sunday was to create a simple micro-service to generate random project names using Zeit's serverless-functions and the dictionary from Glitch.

And here it is (code), it's pretty short and not too complex.

const words = require("friendly-words");

function generate(count = 1, separator = "-") {
  const { predicates, objects } = words;
  const pCount = predicates.length;
  const oCount = objects.length;
  const output = [];

  for (let i = 0; i < count; i++) {
    const pair = [predicates[Math.floor(Math.random() * pCount)], objects[Math.floor(Math.random() * oCount)]];
    output.push(pair.join(separator));
  }

  return output;
}

module.exports = { generate }

If you don't want to include it in your project directly, you can use the HTTP endpoint to generate random project names (in the form of "X-Y") by making a web request to https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names, which will return something like the following.

["momentous-professor"]

You can also control how many names to generate with the a query-string parameter of count=x, e.g. https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names?count=100

["melon-tangerine","broad-jury","rebel-hardcover","far-friend","notch-hornet","principled-wildcat","level-pilot","steadfast-bovid","holistic-plant","expensive-ulna","sixth-gear","political-wrench","marred-spatula","aware-weaver","awake-pair","nosy-hub","absorbing-petunia","rhetorical-birth","paint-sprint","stripe-reward","fine-guardian","coconut-jumbo","spangle-eye","sudden-euphonium","familiar-fossa","third-seaplane","workable-cough","hot-light","diligent-ceratonykus","literate-cobalt","tranquil-sandalwood","alabaster-pest","sage-detail","mousy-diascia","burly-food","fern-pie","confusion-capybara","harsh-asterisk","simple-triangle","brindle-collard","destiny-poppy","power-globeflower","ruby-crush","absorbed-trollius","meadow-blackberry","fierce-zipper","coal-mailbox","sponge-language","snow-lawyer","adjoining-bramble","deserted-flower","able-tortoise","equatorial-bugle","neat-evergreen","pointy-quart","occipital-tax","balsam-fork","dear-fairy","polished-produce","darkened-gondola","sugar-pantry","broad-slouch","safe-cormorant","foregoing-ostrich","quasar-mailman","glittery-marble","abalone-titanosaurus","descriptive-arch","nickel-ostrich","historical-candy","mire-mistake","painted-eater","pineapple-sassafras","pastoral-thief","holy-waterlily","mewing-humor","bubbly-cave","pepper-situation","nosy-colony","sprout-aries","cyan-bestseller","humorous-plywood","heavy-beauty","spiral-riverbed","gifted-income","lead-kiwi","pointed-catshark","ninth-ocean","purple-toucan","tundra-cut","coal-geography","icy-lunaria","agate-wildcat","respected-garlic","polar-almandine","periodic-narcissus","carbonated-waiter","lavish-breadfruit","confirmed-brand","repeated-period"]

You can control separator with the a query-string parameter of separator. i.e, separator=@ , e.g. https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names?separator=@

["handsomely@asterisk"]

A very useful aspect of this project is that if a combination of words tends towards being offensive, it is easy to update the Glitch repo to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Assuming that the project hosting doesn't get too expensive I will keep the service up, but feel free to clone it yourselves if you ever want to create a similar micro-service.

Live example

What follows is a super quick example of the API in action.

const render = (promise, elementId) => {
  promise.then(async(response) => {
    const el = document.getElementById(elementId);
    el.innerText = await response.text();
  })
};


onload = () => {
  render(fetch("https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names"), "basic");
  render(fetch("https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names?count=100"), "many");
  render(fetch("https://friendly-project-name.kinlan.now.sh/api/names?separator=@"), "separator");
}

Single response

Many resposnses

Custom separators