I love this warm color scheme from Steph Ango (kepano, CEO of Obsidian) based on printing inks and warm paper. It's my new default theme in Sublime Text—which is still my preferred editor when I'm not slogging through large PHP codebases.

A few years ago we built a tiny web tool to view a site's DNS records. I still use it on a regular basis when I need to do a quick lookup.

Some cool tidbits:

• Visit dnsrecords.io/{domain} to jump straight to the results (great for a Raycast/Alfred workflow!)
• Type ip or visit dnsrecords.io/ip to display your current IP address
• When you share a link to dnsrecords.io/{domain}, it will display the records in the meta & open graph descriptions

File watchers are powerful tools. We take them for granted because they're often baked in, like Webpack rebuilding when you save a file.

Sometimes I'm in an environment without auto-reloading to my disposal. Yesterday, I was working on a CLI tool. The workflow was modify code, save changes, switch to terminal, run the tool, and look at the output. It's not that bad, but I'd prefer a shorter feedback loop.

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Last week, Unsplash added "blurhashes" to their API. Blurhashes are 20-30 character strings that represent a blurred placeholder of an image.

Blurred image placeholders aren't new, but I was completely stomped to see what kind of gradient maps are generated with only 30 characters.

In short, BlurHash takes an image, and gives you a short string (only 20-30 characters!) that represents the placeholder for this image. You do this on the backend of your service, and store the string along with the image. When you send data to your client, you send both the URL to the image, and the BlurHash string. Your client then takes the string, and decodes it into an image that it shows while the real image is loading over the network. The string is short enough that it comfortably fits into whatever data format you use. For instance, it can easily be added as a field in a JSON object.

Unsplash uses the BlurHash algorithm to generate the placeholders. BlurHash is not a library but an algorithm, and they have 5 first party implementations including TypeScript. There's also a third party package for PHP.

The algorithm is very simple - less than two hundred lines of code - and can easily be ported to your platform of choice.

Read more about BlurHash on GitHub.