happy-new-year

As most of you have noticed, I (almost) always post on a Thursday.
This year, for the first time since 2009, New Year's Eve is on a Thursday!
So first of all Happy New Year everyone! Let's make this year kick 2015's ass!

I've decided to pick a few of the best (in my opinion) articles I've written this year. This is something I've never done before, but I think it's a good way of looking back at the year, and gaining better understanding as to what I've been dealing with (mostly technologically). so I came up with the following:

  • Why Meteor is the dominating Full Stack framework - In the beginning of the year (February), I've decided to write about the usage statistics of Meteor compared to some other JavaScript Frameworks, since then I've been doing a lot of work with Meteor, which has proven to be a mature and robust framework.
  • Meteoro - Pomodoro App on Meteor - After praising Meteor so much (but before participating in large scale applications), I've had a chance to write a small Meteor based web application called Meteoro. It's basically a Pomodoro timer that runs on Meteor, pretty cool.
  • WP Plugin Packer - Create Plugin Packs for WordPress - One of my latest WordPress Plugins. This time I was trying to solve a problem I've had with importing/exporting WordPress blogs (especially when running multiple similar ones), I simply made a plugin that automates installation of a big number of plugins.
  • Moving from WordPress to Jekyll - The biggest change I've done to this website in years. I decided to move it from WordPress to Jekyll. The reasons are pretty clear and can be summed up in 3 words: Speed, Cost & Security

Honorable mentions

  • Adding Config to your AngularJS app - 2 years ago I've written an article after experimenting with AngularJS (I believe it was for the Berlin On Feier app), little did I know that it would become the most read article in this blog (with over 15,000 readers this year alone).
  • Filtering with AngularJS - Another AngularJS related article, also one of my most popular articles.



Hope this year will be a great one, full of insight and free of bugs :)
Finally, to add some new material, a free tip:


Preventing Chrome from accidently closing

For years there has been an annoying bug (or feature?) in Chrome that closed the entire browser (bye bye 20+ tabs) when you press CTRL+SHIFT+Q.
As someone that uses Keyboard Shortcuts for 99% of actions, I often press CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to navigate between tabs, or CTRL+W to close the current tab. These shortcuts are so close to that terrible exit shortcut, that I accidently exit the entire browser about once every 10 days.

SuperUser had an answer for this. Apparently there's an option on the Chrome Menu to "Warn Before Quitting".
67 Upvotes (and counting) for this answer, yet it only works on a Mac. It's pretty disappointing that so few people on SuperUser are using Linux, or at least are aware of Windows too? It's still the most popular operating system when it comes to Desktops (and we're talking about Chrome on a Desktop anyways).
At any rate, I found a clever workaround for this issue, instead of reporting a bug and wait a couple of years for this to get fixed, or try looking for an extension, only to find out that the options are very slim, I've decided to override the shortcut.

If you go to Chrome Extensions page (directly at chrome://extensions), on the bottom you should see Keyboard Shortcuts. Simply define a shortcut there to be trigged by CTRL+SHIFT+Q and it will never bother you again!
Make sure to also override CTRL+SHIFT+W, as that one closes only the window (most of us are using 1 window with multiple tabs so it's just as terrible).