Welcome ... I'm Kristof

I've been a passionate software developer for almost 30 years and currently a tech-savvy IT manager. I tinker with things like this blog in my spare time, because creating things never lets you go. Here is more about me ...


SVWW vs Paderborn @ 2024-02-23
SV Wehen Wiesbaden

SVWW vs. Paderborn @ 2024-02-23

An odyssey and a defeat

1:2

Matchday … and another evening game and this time against SC Paderborn, who had to endure quite a debacle (4:0) against Kiel last week, but are still knocking at the top of the table.

This time I also got some extra tickets for friends and my wife, because one of them is from Paderborn and has been following his team for years and had no problem travelling 3 hours there and 3 hours back just for one game. My wife comes from the Sauerland region and Paderborn is not far away, so she felt a bit of sympathy for the SC, even though she now lives in Wiesbaden. The other two are actually Eintracht fans and know the Waldstadion with its 58,000 seats and wanted to see the cosy atmosphere of the Brita-Arena.

The meeting point was 90 minutes before kick-off at the railway station. There was enough time to delay the boys’ arrival, take a short walk to the stadium (about a kilometre) and enjoy a stadium sausage or two. My wife and I had decided to take the bus for the sake of convenience. We were on time and waiting for the others when I realised that instead of my smartphone, I had my wife’s almost identical one in my pocket. F***! How were the others supposed to reach me if they were late or something else was wrong? I don’t know how we survived without these mobile gadgets at the end of the nineties!? I felt amputated, blind and deaf. ME, without my smartphone … that never happened before!

Continue reading ...

Grinning Horse
Discoveries

Discoveries #28 - UI Components

UI is the first building block for UX. Build a user interface that is easy to understand and use and your users will have a good experience and enjoy your website or web app.

In this new edition of Discoveries (after three long months without), we look at UI elements that are worth a second look. Some of these I'm pretty sure I'll incorporate into one of my existing projects and others I'll find an opportunity for in the future.

  • Syntax highlighting code blocks with Prism and the Custom Highlight API
  • Syntax.js
  • Replace JavaScript Dialogs With New HTML Dialog
  • Build an off-canvas menu with <dialog> and web components
  • Windowise
  • Accordion Slider - Responsive and Touch-enabled accordion
  • floatype.js
  • canvas-datagrid
  • TreeData.js
  • Grid-Overflow

Continue reading ...

Garden Beauties V
A New Blog

Manipulation of Lists within a Sentence of Natural Language

Alternative to classic forms with the help of some JavaScript

The photo section on my blog, the main page of which I have now named COLLECTION, initially only served as an overview of the available or already used hero images for the various pages of the blog, such as posts and others. In the meantime, detailed pages for the individual photos and a world map have been added, in order to follow the IndieWeb idea that I want to publish my photos on my own site with all the information first and then syndicate them on other platforms.

At some point I implemented three different view modes for the photos, more out of a desire to play around than out of necessity: Grid, List and lastly Masonry. Depending on the device class, one mode or the other has its advantages in terms of overview.

Mode Switch Controls

What was still missing, however, was the option to filter and/or sort the amount of photos according to their use, as over time there are more rather than fewer and it becomes increasingly difficult to find the image you are looking for. I had already placed 3 icon buttons at the top right-hand corner for the various view modes and was faced with the decision of how to implement further control elements such as drop-down lists or similar. But I didn’t want the interface to look like “Your Company’s App” at some point, plastered with controls that distract the eye from the photos. Ideas such as folding and unfolding control panels, i.e. hiding the functionality, were also out of the question at second glance. That would only have shifted the problem.

Continue reading ...

Leipzig Music Colors

WIRTZ DNA-Tour 2024, Leipzig @ 2024-02-17

The Rock is back...

To anticipate: I’m a fucking groupie when it comes to seeing Daniel Wirtz in action on stage. My wife (also a long-time fan) and I drove 400 and some crushed kilometres to Leipzig to see his show at the Felsenkeller. FINALLY he is back on tour with his new damn good and loud album DNA.

For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about: Daniel Wirtz, or simply WIRTZ, is the only German rock artist who really deserves that name. You may forgive me, but I’ve been listening to Rock, Hard Rock, Metal and the like since the early 80s (my first album was KISS - Unmasked), and not one German citizen had enough rock in their blood for me like the Brits or Americans have in abundance. I was always of the opinion that Grunge, Nu Metal and all similar sounds couldn’t come from Germany, let alone … be performed with German lyrics! But I was wrong…

I first became aware of WIRTZ in 2015 on a nice German TV show called “Sing mein Song- Das Tauschkonzert“ (Sing My Song, The Swap Concert), where he rocked out songs by other artists in his inimitable way. He sang the lyrics of other authors and put his own guitar sound underneath. Awesome! But what is most ingenious about WIRTZ are his own lyrics. Straightforward on the one hand and very poetic on the other. Simply awesome shit in this combination!

Continue reading ...

Carnival Brass

Impressions from the Carnival Parade in Wiesbaden

In Germany, especially along the Rhine, there is only one thing for many people every February: Fasching, Fastnacht, Fasnet or simply Karneval. Many terms that all mean the same thing: Making party as long as you can. Mainz, on the other (wrong) side of the Rhine from my home town Wiesbaden, is one of the three strongholds of carnival in this respect. Their Rose Monday parade is really impressive, but Wiesbaden also has such a parade, on Sunday, and it is usually a little longer than the one in Mainz, although not as pompous and live on TV.

This Sunday, after a long time, I was once again at the parade in Wilhelmstraße at 12.11 pm and had my camera with me …

Continue reading ...

SVWW vs Nürnberg @ 2024-02-09
SV Wehen Wiesbaden

SVWW vs. Nürnberg @ 2024-02-09

A game among friends

1:1

Tim and I have known each other since we were at school, which is over 40 years now. He has always been a fan of 1. FC Nürnberg and I can still remember him teasing me on Monday mornings at school about my HSV’s poor performance at the weekend and me teasing him when his Nuremberg team had lost again. Now we were both just sympathisers of our clubs rather than real fans, because I’d never been to a stadium in Hamburg and I don’t think Tim had ever been to the Nuremberg arena either.

Now my passion for football with my hometown club SV Wehen Wiesbaden has awakened in the last year and I have a season ticket for this season and the possibility to get 4 more tickets for every game. So it made sense to ask Tim if he would like to watch the home game in Wiesbaden against his 1. FC Nürnberg, which are playing in the second division again since their relegation in the 2019/2020 season. It’s the first time that Tim and I have gone to the stadium together and he convinced his son Tom and two of his mates to go along, even though the three of them didn’t really seem to have anything to do with FCN.

The spectacular game in the first half of the season a few months ago, with a total of 3 red cards, unfortunately ended in a 2:1 loss for the Wiesbaden team. So we had something to settle with the Nurembergers and at least the fans in the stadium were highly motivated.

Continue reading ...

SVWW vs Hertha BSC @ 2024-01-27
SV Wehen Wiesbaden

SVWW vs. Hertha BSC @ 2024-01-27

First home game this year ... and another win

3:1

After four consecutive defeats, the last of which came a week ago away against Magdeburg, the first home game of the year in the second half of the 2. Bundesliga against Hertha BSC was on the programme this Saturday.

I was a little tense, as the team was slowly slipping down the table, but confident that we could win against the Berliners as we had done in the first half of the season, even though Hertha had been unbeaten for almost 10 games. Bärbel, the good soul to my left, was also back in the stadium and we encouraged each other in the best football weather (a little cold but sunny). We had to win again to avoid falling into a mental downward spiral. We and 10,454 spectators believed in it … no, less, because a good quarter of the spectators were quite vociferous Berlin fans. The visitors’ curve was packed.

Continue reading ...

Christmas End

Favourite Pens of 2023

I’ve been collecting imaginative and technologically tricky Codepens on a Trello list for quite a while, primarily to learn and perhaps implement them in a project at some point. A good source for high-quality pens is the recently published list of the Top 100 Pens of 2023 on codepen.io. I have already noticed some of the works over the course of the year, but some have slipped through my fingers and so I am glad that I have this list, the order of which is calculated from the hearts (likes) given and their level.

Here are my 10 favourite pens from 2023 … and, like last year, an 11th jaw-droppingly good pen to start with.

Fantastic piece of CSS art ... and a little JavaScript

What Rafa has conjured up with his pen ClimaCode is truly breathtaking and is spread over 3,658 lines of HTML (including SVG objects), 904 lines of CSS and “only” 138 lines of JavaScript. It’s fun to try out all the controls of this climate dashboard and enjoy the soft parallax effects. My favourite button is of course Nessy.

(Also try out his coffee generator “For The Love Of Coffee”, which is indispensable for IT professionals ;))

Continue reading ...