Starting a promise chain to handle exceptions correctly

Here’s a little promises quirk that I’ve overlooked for a while. Generally we all write promises like this:

doSomething()
  .then(doSomethingElse)
  .then(doSomethingFurther)
  .catch(handleError);

And we know that any exception raised will skip to the catch handler. Except for the initial doSomething() call. If an exception is raised here it will be treated like a normal exception and stop executing all the rest of your code. So how do you deal with it?

Adding font-awesome (or any SVG) to Google Slides

Getting images into Google Slides is simple right, just upload the image and voila. What if instead of images you want icons? You can always take a screenshot of an icon and upload that, but then you’re stuck with the size because resizing that thing is going to make it ugly. There’s a better way.

Replace your CMS with GitHub Pages, Jekyll and Grunt

For years I’ve used Wordpress to host my site, which has been great but it’s overkill for what I need. I’d be happier to write the HTML myself if it wasn’t such a maintenance pain keeping consistency across all the pages. I hated having to update WordPress continually to ensure my site is secure. In order to keep all my site source in Git I have to synchronise the changes that happen automatically on the server, like updates and uploads / media files back to my working copy to commit them. And it doesn’t enable me to keep any of my content in Git, which is most important, I have to take regular database backups for this.

Logging Objects to the Console in Internet Explorer

Compared to other browsers, IE’s JavaScript console is pretty lacking in it’s ability to log objects, they just appear as [Object object]. As a work around for this below is a shim that will JSON.stringify any objects that are passed as parameters to console.log (or it’s sister functions like error, warn…).

Mapping errors in jQuery promises / deferred

For those familiar with JavaScript Promises, jQuery’s Deferred.fail() handling can act unexpectedly. Standard Promises implementations allow the first catch handler to deal with the error and then return to normal execution flow (see JavaScript Promises: There and back again). jQuery on the other hand appears to execute all fail handlers, in the order they were defined with no chance to recover normal flow.