Issue #360  (NetNut Review, React Tools, Git/CLI, JS Utils)06/11/20

The following intro is a paid product review for NetNut, a fast residential proxy network for web scraping, SERP monitoring, and more.

If your startup, enterprise app, or web service needs to gain a competitive edge in your industry, then you might want to consider signing up for a residential proxy service like that offered by NetNut. NetNut's proxy features direct ISP connectivity, which means faster proxy speed and the ability to use static IPs.

Here are some things that NetNut's service allows you to do using their fast and powerful proxy:
 

• Test web pages and ads from different geographic locations
• Anonymously access and scrape content that's geo-blocked
• Monitor your content's search engine results pages (SERPs), and your competitors' SERPs from different locations
• Conduct location-based price comparisons
• Use as part of a business intelligence strategy, to gain more insight into better product positioning, understanding new markets, etc.

As mentioned, NetNut is a residential proxy network. A residential proxy is different from a general proxy service in that it allows you to cloak your IP using IP addresses that are tied to physical home addresses (i.e. residential). This is advantageous because you're less likely to have your IP blocked when doing automated scraping, data extraction, or some type of geo-targeted testing.

As I pointed out earlier, NetNut's proxy service is backed by great performance as a result of direct ISP connectivity. This means NetNut doesn't utilize a standard P2P network and traffic isn't routed through end users’ devices. So there is no bottleneck in traffic flow. This makes NetNut one of the fastest residential proxies available.

Some other features that put NetNut on par with or above other proxy services include:
 

• 24/7 IP availability
• Full web access including search engines
• Low cost per gigabyte
• City/State selection for US
• IP whitelisting
• IP pools are optimized for best use cases

NetNut also offers an easy-to-use Chrome extension. This means you avoid going through proxy integration and you can easily target any country and choose static or rotating residential proxies right from the browser.
 

Once you set up your account (they offer a 7-day trial), you'll have access to a dashboard that includes real-time statistics on total usage, usage per country, number of requests, and more.
 

NetNut's proxy implementation guidelines, which you can view once you set up your account, provide some example code for PHP, Python, C#, Ruby, Bash, and Java.

If you want more info on the product or on residential proxies in general, this blog post might be a good place to start and the NetNut FAQ covers a lot of common queries as well.

As mentioned, being able to stay competitive in your niche in these challenging times is imperative. A tool like NetNut might be exactly what your company needs to get an edge on data extraction, marketing research, SEO analysis, and geo-based ad and web page testing.

So give NetNut a try today via the 7-day trial and see if they can solve your proxy needs with their powerful service.

Now on to this week's tools!
 

React Tools

Signum
Adds a contact/communication widget to your React apps (i.e. bottom right corner messaging unit), the kind you see on many sites today.

RxJS Primitives
A set of libraries provides some low-level operators for handling different operations with Observable values of primitive types (string, number, Boolean, etc).

Little State Machine
A small, dependency-free React custom hook for persist state management that's also compatible with React Native.

windups
React library that adds various animated typewriter effects to text.

Hooked on Redux
A React hook that lets you wield the power of Redux with an interface that's as simple as the useState hook.

React Tiger Transition
Easy page transitions for react-router. Built with react-transition-group. Use the provided transitions or create your own.

react-snaplist-carousel
A dependency-free React carousel component that uses browser-native CSS scroll-snap behaviour.

React Data Grid
Excel-like data grid component built with React. Customizable and has fast rendering when displaying large numbers of rows.

react-teleporter
Teleport React components in the same React tree. Useful for a complex app that requires you to configure one part of the application from another.

Crossword
A flexible, responsive, and easy-to-use crossword puzzle component for React apps.

React-Calendar
Now at version 3. A powerful calendar component for React that doesn't rely on Moment.js.

react-beautiful-dnd
Now at version 13. Beautiful and accessible drag and drop lists for React.

Constate
Now at version 2. Write local state using React Hooks and lift it up with minimum effort to React Context only when needed.
 

Git, GitHub, and CLI Tools

GitHub Application Manager
A Linux tool similar to apt and yum to search for and install applications from GitHub. Works on many different application types that are stored in repos as releases.

DevDash
A highly configurable terminal dashboard for developers that allows you to choose and display the most up-to-date metrics you need at one place, from  Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and GitHub.

npmhub
Chrome extension to explore npm dependencies on GitHub and GitLab repos.

OctoPush
Real-time GitHub notifications. Configure events on your repositories and receive real-time push notifications when those events occur.

Remote GitHub
VS Code extension that lets you browse GitHub repositories in VS Code. This makes opening a remote GitHub repo as easy as opening a local folder.

git-fuzzy
A CLI interface to git that relies heavily on fzf (a CLI fuzzy finder).

Simple Blogger
A simple blog generator that creates a blog based on a user's GitHub projects. It creates a post for each project and uses the content of README as post content.

GitScrum
Organize your work to increase performance. Everything you need to manage
your projects remotely.

the-one-cert
SSL cert that is valid for any and all domains + all levels of subdomains. I assume you'll have to be handy with CLI and Node stuff to install this, renew, etc.

LogChanges
Generate a project changelog based on Git commits and history.

Rclone
A command line program to manage files on cloud storage. A feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces with support for 50+ cloud providers (Dropbox, S3, Google Cloud, etc).

shrun
Test Node CLI commands in isolated Docker containers.

JavaScript Utilities

keen-slider
Library-agnostic touch slider/carousel with native touch/swipe behavior and great performance. Comes with TypeScript support, multitouch support, and works in IE10+.

Quotebacks
A small library to embed a snippet of text, in context, on a web page, with the option to also use it as a Chrome extension.

Grid.js
An open-source HTML table plugin written in TypeScript. It works with most JavaScript frameworks, including React, Angular.js, and Vue.

number-precision
1K tiny & fast lib for doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations precisely. This is to fix JavaScript quirks like 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004.

Angelfire
Lets you quickly build right-click-enabled context menus and drop-down menus for any element on your webpage.

Fluor.js
A tiny JavaScript library that provides you with a high-level language to easily add interactions and effects to your websites.

NanoPop
An ultra-tiny positioning engine (for tooltips, etc), similar to Popper.js without all the extra features that aren't needed, making it smaller.

umi-request
A network request library, based on Fetch that combines the features of Fetch and Axios, providing common functions such as caching, timeout, character encoding processing, and error handling.

color2k
A color parsing and manipulation library that keeps bundle size small while still satisfying all of your color manipulation needs in an sRGB space.

Shifty
A flexible and extensible tweening engine optimized for performance with animation fidelity comparable to GSAP and a small footprint (5kb minified and gzip'd).

Fuse.js
Now at version 6. A powerful, lightweight fuzzy-search library, with zero dependencies.

slugify
Now at v1.0. Small utility to 'slugify' a string, useful for URLs, filenames, and IDs, and handles most major languages (German, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, etc).

A Tweet for Thought

Speaking of CLI stuff, David Walsh started a Twitter thread asking for cool bash aliases. Lots of suggestions.
 

Send Me Your Tools!

Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @WebToolsWeekly (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

If you're looking for a developers-only search engine (for code documentation and suck) you might want to try out Quickref, an experimental search engine that targets a curated subset of the web: official docs, forums, blogs, and repositories. And bonus: no cookies, tracking, or data collection.

Thanks to all for subscribing and reading!

Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@LouisLazaris