TLDR #2 - August 2021

📚 TLDR (Too Long; Don't Read) is a monthly post to help you discover some great and innovative github projects, youtube channels or blog posts.

Today's episode is about : a PHP library to dynamically create PHP class and files, a lightweight javascript library to add spice to your website, a jQuery like scraping tool, a new way to add interaction on a website and a little bonus at the end 😀

php-generator (Github)

This library will help you easily create dynamic PHP files. For instance, you have difficulties to create a PHP cli that creates PHP files, php-generator is made for you. This is not the only way to use it Use cases are almost infinite. With only few lines of code, you can easily create the basic structure of a class that respects code normes with a proper identation. It is currently compatible from the version 5.6 to the version 8.0. Other then that, the documentation is pretty good and it gives you many examples.

tilt.js (Github)

You want to add some spice to your website because you think it looks too static, add tilt.js to your project, trust me, the result will be insane. Created by gijsroge, tilt.js will add translation effect when hovering over an element. You can customize anything like the perspective, the speed, the easing transition and many others. It can be used with Vanilla JS, React, Polymer and Preact which makes it really versatile.

Examples : https://gijsroge.github.io/tilt.js/

cheerio (Github)

Cheerio is a Node.js library that will make scraping processes very easy. Why is it so easy to use ? Because it reuses the jQuery syntax which means that, if you are already familiar with jQuery, you will not feel lost using Cheerio. This library will help you traversing and manipulating the html structure of a website. In other words, you can extract informations using Cheerio to create a REST API on your own. It is really fast and flexible, that's why it is currently used by more than 650k people.

• Documentation: https://cheerio.js.org/

Web stories (Github)

Web stories has become a new way to interact with a website. It helps your audience get involved. Web stories can help share informations, promote things or even talk about random subjects. Because it is becoming more and more important, I wanted to share with you two options to create web stories : web-stories-wp and web stories by amp. The first one, web-stories-wp, is a Wordpress plugin created by Google to easily create web stories. The second one, web stories by amp, is a little bit more tricky to use because you will need to create you web stories using html tags which makes the process harder but not impossible. They both have a great look and the final result is pretty good.

Bonus

As i said, there is a little bonus. This is not a project per se but more a utility tool. It is called Cascadia Code. You are probably wondering what it is ? Cascadia Code is a font made by developers for other developers. It supports ligature and cursive style. This is a great alternative to other paid fonts like Operator Mono. This one is completly free and it looks really good. Just enable ligature and cursive style and see the result. This is the font i personnaly use and i really like it 😀

Cover by Jeff Sheldon