Culture, Climate, and Code
I recently built a web app for browsing and learning sign languages. The original goal was to build an interface on top of SparQL and showcase sign languages content on Wikimedia Commons. This weekend I finally took the time to deploy it. You can try it out here.
Seven of my favorite online tools for web development.
I do not think that the Coolors app helps me enough when it comes to selecting a palette for my next project, but hey, we can’t expect that. With its great user experience and useful sharing options it’s my go to tool for creating or sharing color palettes.
RegExr does not only have great UI for writing and testing Regular Expressions but it also provides a library of others solutions and a cheatsheet.
Safari, Chrome, Edge, they all got their own type of special icons and manifests these days. The Real Favicon Generator allows me to upload a SVG and specify some settings to generate these and icons for all common devices and environments.
Whenever I need a non developer to edit a JSON document I send them to JSON Editor Online, It’s GUI allows for easy editing and sharing.
It’s not uncommon that I need some static GeoJSON. GeoJSON.io allows me to draw geometries and add properties as I wish.
Need a key code? Just head over to keycode.info and click the key you need the code for, especially useful when you work with custom keyboards such as remote controls.
No need to patch your .gitignore files as you go. Make sure that you ignore what you need from the beginning. Nowadays I use this through an VS Code extension.
UPDATE: By setting a cache-control: no-cache header you can disable this query caching.
Whenever you write a Wikidata query form which you do not expect the result to be the same each time, you will run into the issue of caching. Lets take the following example, returning a random cat:
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel (MD5(CONCAT(STR(?item), STR(RAND()))) as ?random)
WHERE
{
?item wdt:P31 wd:Q146.
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE], en". }
} ORDER BY ?random
LIMIT 1
Run in the Wikidata Query Editor
If you run this once you will get a random cat if you run this twice you will get the same random cat.
This is because Wikidata has saved the result, to serve you faster the second time.
A solution some people uses is to “just add a space somewhere”, this is possible because Wikidata cache queries based on the SparQL string, not the actual parsed and preformed query.
When used in implementations keeping track of spaces is not an option so I decided to use random comments that could be generated from hashing functions etc:
#01e8c03a6bdfe392431d8189130fcfc0
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel (MD5(CONCAT(STR(?item), STR(RAND()))) as ?random)
WHERE
{
?item wdt:P31 wd:Q146.
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE], en". }
} ORDER BY ?random
LIMIT 1
Changing the comment string and rerunning the query will result in an new random cat.
When actually used in real world implementations where you might minify your queries I suggest appending the comment just before preforming it.
SHA512 function and not the MD5 one used in my examples. I have updated the example because the MD5 function preforms about five times as fast.