Web Development + Follow

A little bit of animation on a site can add some flair, impress users, and get their attention. You could have them run, no matter where they are on the page, immediately when the page loads. But what if your website is fairly long so it took some time for the user to scroll down …

You know that joke, “Two front-end developers walk into a bar and find they have nothing in common”? It’s funny, yet frustrating, because it’s true. This article will present three different perspectives on accessibility in web design and development. Three perspectives that could help us bridge the great divide between users and designers/developers. It might …

SVG is a great image format, so it’s nice to able to use it in WordPress. If you’re looking to be using SVG in WordPress. , we’ve got you covered here with all the best options.

Another aspect of web components that we haven’t talked about yet is that a JavaScript function is called whenever a web component is added or removed from a page. These lifecycle callbacks can be used for many things, including making an element aware of its context.

I remember vividly a period early in my coding career when I began to feel that things were changing away from what I knew, and headed towards a more complex set of tools and practices, anchored in the command line and something called npm. This is the first part of a beginner’s guide where we …

One of the things that makes this new, tooling-heavy era of front-end development so seemingly hard to understand at first is that, while we often call things by a singular name, they tend to be actually comprised of several different interconnected pieces. The same is true for npm and the ecosystem around it. For example: …

Now that we know what npm stands for and have a super general idea of what it does and how it fits into web development, we ought to spend a little bit of time looking at the command line, because it’s how we interact with npm.

Here’s what you need to know about Node.js (or simply Node) and how it relates to npm right off the bat: Node is JavaScript, but as a server-side language. This is possible because of V8, Chromium’s JavaScript engine, which can run on its own, outside the confines of the browser. Node and browser-based JavaScript can …

If you’re keeping score, so far in this npm guide we’ve developed a general understanding of what npm is—notably, that it stands for Node Package Manager. In the process, we’ve discussed the importance of the command line and how it’s used with npm. We also looked specifically at the “n” in npm—Node—and learned that Node …

Feel like you have a pretty good idea of what a package manager is? We’ve certainly covered a lot of ground getting familiar with all the terms and concepts of package managers, but I’d say it’s high time we actually do something with our newfound knowledge. But first, we need to install npm. To that …

By now, you’re becoming quite knowledgeable with npm! So far, we’ve broken down the three letters in “npm” to gain a better understand of Node and package managers. In the previous chapter, we even installed Node and npm while getting acquainted with Node Version Manager, or nvm. Next up in this beginner’s guide to npm …

npm is, as you now know, a package manager. But like similar, earlier tools that run tasks in the command line, such as Grunt and Gulp, npm can also run tasks—which is perfect for us because now that we installed the Sass package in the previous chapter, we can starting using it!

We’ve gotten a good overview of how npm works and how to use it to install packages and run commands at this point. Now let’s go a little further and see what it looks like to download and install an existing npm project, rather than starting one from scratch. More likely than not, that’s probably …

There’s a serene warmth to the early evening sunlight peaking through rustling leaves. Artists use dappled light to create a soft, hypnotic effect. We can create the same sort of dappled light effect in web design, using it on photos and illustrations to add that magic touch to what might otherwise be drab walls of …

What’s new in CSS? If someone asked you that, who knows CSS but hasn’t stayed up to date the last, say, half a decade or more, what advice would you give?

There are a number of options for including a Table of Contents lock in WordPress. You can use a plugin, or try to do it yourself.

The VitePWA plugin from Anthony Fu is a fantastic tool for your Vite-powered sites. It helps you add a service worker that handles: offline support caching assets and content prompting the user when new content is available …and other goodies! We’ll walk through the concept of service workers together, then jump right into making one …

Another year has passed and once again I’ve had the privilege of going through the Web Tools Weekly newsletter archives from the past 12 months to hunt down the front-end tools that readers found to be the most interesting during 2021. So, to kick off 2022, I’ve compiled a list of the 60 most popular …

Stoyan is absolutely correct. As much as we all love CSS, it’s still an important player in how websites load and using less of it is a good thing. He has a neat new bookmarklet called CSS Me Not to help diagnose unnecessary CSS files, but we’ll get to that in a moment. The problem …

Mondrian is famous for paintings with big thick black lines forming a grid, where each cell is white, red, yellow, or blue. This aesthetic pairs well with the notoriously rectangular web, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed over the years with CSS developers. I saw some Mondrian Art in CSS going around the other day and …

The Svelte transition API provides a first-class way to animate your components when they enter or leave the document, including custom Svelte transitions. By default, the transition directive uses CSS animations, which generally offer better performance and allow the browser’s main thread to remain unblocked. The API is as simple as this: <element transition:transitionFunction />. …

Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Accessibility is one of those things! Here’s a list of related links to other articles that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.

Sass offers functions and mixins that accept parameters. You can use Sass default parameters, that is, parameters that have a value even if you don’t provide them when the function or mixin is called. Let’s focus on mixins here. Here’s the syntax of a mixin: It’s safer and more useful to set up default parameters …

Hot off the presses from Devon Govett, creator of Parcel, is Parcel CSS: A CSS parser, transformer, and minifier written in Rust. Nice. The CSS world could use a little processing shake up like this. I just wrote a few weeks ago: Ya know how esbuild has seriously shaken things up for the JavaScript processing world? Maybe …

It’s a god-damned miracle to me that open source is as robust as it is in tech. Consider the options. You could have a job (or be entrepreneurial) with your coding skills and likely be paid quite well. Or, you could write code for free and have strangers yell at you every day at all …

You know how you can get cardboard boxes that come totally flat? You fold ‘em up and tape ‘em to make them into a useful box. Then when it’s time to recycle them, you cut them back apart to flatten them. Recently, someone reached out to me about essentially this concept as a 3D animation …

Netlify is amazing at static file hosting, but it’s really so much more than that. You can build any sort of website, even highly dynamic apps, with the Jamstack approach and static file hosting at the core. Say you want to build a TODO app with users. Those users will need to sign up and …

Say you have an elements with CSS tooltips and you’re going to position those tooltips such that it opens up next to the element on hover (or probably better: when clicked/tapped). Next to it where? Above it? What if the element is already really close to the top of the screen? In that case, it …

Vite (pronounced “veet”) is a newish JavaScript bundler. It comes batteries-included, requires almost no configuration to be useful, and includes plenty of configuration options. Oh—and it’s fast. Incredibly fast. This post will walk through the process of converting an existing project to Vite. We’ll cover things like aliases, shimming webpack’s dotenv handling, and server proxying. …

Custom Fields in WordPress are arbitrary bits of data that you can apply to Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types in WordPress. Metadata, as it were, in the form of key/value pairs. For example: Key: subtitle / Value: They are more than they are cracked up to be Key: header_color_override / Value: #e52e05 Key: property_url …