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Better two factor authentication experiences with WebOTP

Two factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to improve the security of user accounts in an application. It helps protect against common issues with passwords, like users picking easily guessable passwords or reusing the same password across multiple sites. There are different ways to implement two factor authentication, including SMS, using an authenticator application and WebAuthn.

Alias your Mastodon username to your own domain with Jekyll

Mastodon is different to most online services. It is a federated network, so when you set up an account you need to choose a server to use. Your username then becomes a combination of your handle and that server you signed up to. For example, I am currently @philnash@mastodon.social.

How to use the Bitly API in Ruby

Link shortening has been around for a long time and Bitly is arguably the king of the link shorteners. It has support for shortening long URLs as well as custom short links, custom domains, and metrics to track how each link is performing.

Don't ever write your own function to parse URL parameters

Sometimes the platform we are building on provides more functionality than we can keep in our own heads. However, depending on the problem, we often find ourselves trying to write the code to solve the issue rather than finding and using the existing solution provided by the platform. I almost fell for this recently when trying to parse a query string.