Technical Rex

Spring Security and JWT - Clearer, Safer, Verifiable

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Erik Gillespie

If you are familiar with my Stateless Authentication with Spring Security and JWT tutorial, you may be pleased to know that I made the example a little safer, fixed a bug that prevented tokens from being inspected with third-party tools, and wrote better setup instructions

Keep reading for more details, including links to specs and a cool online JWT debugger!

Schedule Blog Content for a Static Site

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Erik Gillespie

Static site generators are very appealing to designers and coders who want to blog. They're free, fast, secure, rich with plugins and themes, and the lack of a database and little to no server-side processing sheds a lot of the hassle associated with blogging. There are features common to dynamic sites (like WordPress) that you won't get out of the box with a static site generator.

Like publishing content on a schedule.

Quickly Upgrade Your GitHub Pages Site to Jekyll 3

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Erik Gillespie

GitHub recently upgraded their GitHub Pages platform (a.k.a. free static site hosting!) from Jekyll 2.4 to Jekyll 3.0. They published an article about the changes, but it didn't seem very comprehensive. After reading it, I generally felt like things should just continue to work... but they didn't.

I've since gone through four static sites and upgraded them to Jekyll 3. Here's the quick and dirty version of what I had to do to get those sites looking pretty and working the way I expected them to.

Strip the Background from an Image

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Erik Gillespie

Lots of product photos are taken with a white background. So what do you do if you want to promote that product, but the white background of the image clashes with the non-white background of your website? In this tutorial I will show you some quick tricks to make the image background transparent so it looks more natural on your own site.

What's in a Landing Page?

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Erik Gillespie

Last week Technical Rex launched its latest project: Giving Jar. Right now the landing page for Giving Jar looks pretty basic: some markety text, a pretty picture, and a place to sign up for a newsletter. There's more than meets the eye on that page, though, and creating it was quite the expedition.

Many discoveries were made, there were several pitfalls, and good notes were taken so a map could be made. I share this map with you now so that you don't have to repeat the voyage without a guide.