Web Development + Follow

Some commentary from Zack Bloom on the Cloudflare Blog, looking at requests to CDNJS for versions of jQuery. What we don’t see is a decline in our old versions which come close to the volume of growth of new versions when they’re released. In fact the release of 3.4.1, as popular as it quickly becomes, …

With a name as big as React, it’s bound to cause some Stream-Crossing Confusion, as I like to call it. How do you center a <div> in React? Dave Ceddia: React cares exactly zero about styling. Think of it as generating the barebones HTML. React will put elements on the page, but everything after that …

Tartan is a patterned cloth that’s typically associated with Scotland, particularly their fashionable kilts. On tartanify.com, we gathered over 5,000 tartan patterns (as SVG and PNG files), taking care to filter out any that have explicit usage restrictions. The idea was cooked up by Sylvain Guizard during our summer holidays in Scotland. At the very beginning, …

Nicholas C. Zakas: Eventually, I settled on a list of questions I would ask myself for each problem as it arose. I found that asking these questions, in order, helped me make the best decision possible: 1) Is this really a problem?2) Does the problem need to be solved?3) Does the problem need to be …

Let’s create a pure CSS effect that changes the color of a text link on hover… but slide that new color in instead of simply swapping colors.

I’ve had a bunch of tabs open that just so happen to all be related to typography, so I figured I’d give myself the mental release of closing them by blogging them. How’s that for a blog post format for ya: whatever random tabs you’ve had open for far too long.

Hey how cool! A documentary about Vue! Good timing as it looks like VueConf is happening right now. (Reminder we have a site for conferences to tell you stuff like that). Sarah appears in it (about 21:13) and talks about CSS-Tricks for a second, so we’re officially super famous now and I have already booked …

Looking at the CMS scene today, there are upwards of 150 options to choose from — and that’s not including whatever home-grown custom alternatives people might be running. The term “Content Management System” is broad and most site builders fit into the CMS model. Craft CMS, a relatively new choice in this field (launched in …

Robin recently lamented the common complaint that CSS is frustrating. There are misconceptions about what it is and what it does. There are debates about what kind of language it is. There are even different views on where it should be written. Rachel Andrew has a new talk from An Event Apart DC 2019 available …

Even a simple Card component can be tricky to design an API around. What abstraction are you providing? How much control do you want to give? If you make it too flexible, you aren’t providing much value. If you make it to rigid, you also aren’t providing much value.

I was extremely excited when I first heard that clip-path: path() was coming to Firefox. Just imagine being able to easily code a breathing box like the one below with just one HTML element and very little CSS without needing SVG or a huge list of points inside the polygon function! Chris was excited about …

Have you ever found yourself either writing a CSS selector that winds up looking confusing as heck, or seen one while reading through someone’s code? That happened to me the other day. Here’s what I wrote: At the end of it, I honestly couldn’t even explain what it does to myself. LOL, that probably means …

<input type=”number”>, <input type=”date”>, <input type=”search”>, <select multiple>, <progress>, <meter>, <dialog>, <details><summary>, <video>, <div onclick>, <div aria-label>, <a href><div>Block Links</div></a>, aria-controls, role=”tablist” 😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬

Not long ago, I posted about PHP templating in just PHP (which is basically HEREDOC syntax). I’m literally using that technique for some super basic templating I needed to do on this very WordPress site. The main pushback was that this kind of thing can be an XSS vulnerability. In my case, it’s not, because …

A standard e-commerce site has a few common pages. There are product pages, shop pages that list products, and let’s not forget pages for the user account, checkout flow and cart. WooCommerce makes it a trivial task to set these up on a WordPress site because it provides templates for them and create the pages …

Over a decade ago, I did a little three-part video series on Designing for WordPress. Then I did other series with the same spirit, like videocasting the whole v10 redesign, a friend’s website, and even writing a book. Those are getting a little long in the tooth though. You might still learn from watching them …

Think of building sites with Gatsby as an hourglass shape. Gatsby itself is right in the middle. The wide funnel at the top represents the fact that Gatsby can take in data from all sorts of sources. The data could be in markdown files, from a headless CMS or some other API, from a hosted …

Here’s a great thread by Kevin Powell that’s making the rounds. He believes so many folks see CSS as a frustrating and annoying language:

Tim Kadlec: One particular pattern for loading non-critical CSS I’ve seen is the preload/polyfill pattern. With this approach, you load any stylesheets as preloads instead, and then use their onload events to change them back to a stylesheet once the browser has them ready. So you’re trying to make your stylesheet more async, but it causes two …

GraphQL is becoming popular and developers are constantly looking for frameworks that make it easy to set up a fast, secure and scalable GraphQL API. In this article, we will learn how to create a scalable and fast GraphQL API with authentication and fine-grained data-access control (authorization). As an example, we’ll build an API with …

Here’s a fun one. How might we create a set of those cool Matryoshka dolls where they nest inside one another… but in CSS? I toyed with this idea in my head for a little while. Then, I saw a tweet from CSS-Tricks and the article image had the dolls. I took that as a …

This is not that blog post. I’m saying let’s say you were. This is not a knock any other blog posts out there about Dark Mode. There are lots of good ones, and I’m a fan of any information-sharing blog post. This is more of a thought exercise on what I think it would take …

Nice demo from Sebastiano Guerriero. When a fixed-position header moves from overlapping differently-colored backgrounds, the colors flop out to be appropriate for that background. Sebastiano’s technique is very clever, involving multiple copies of the header within each section (where the copies are hidden from screenreaders) which are all positioned on top of each other and …

Earlier this year, I came across this demo by Florin Pop, which makes a line go either over or under the letters of a single line heading. I thought this was a cool idea, but there were a few little things about the implementation I felt I could simplify and improve at the same time.

Here’s a neat idea from Tim Kadlec. He uses the Modheader extension to toggle custom headers in his browser. It also lets him see when images are too big and need to be optimized in some way. This is a great way to catch issues like this in a local environment because browsers will throw …

I was recently working on a modern take of the blogroll. The idea was to offer readers a selection of latest posts from those blogs in a magazine-style layout, instead of just popping a list of our favorite blogs in the sidebar. The easy part was grabbing a list of posts with excerpts from our …

Learn how to create a custom CodePen block with a preview for Sanity Studio, inspired by Chris Coyier’s implementation for Wordpress’ Gutenberg editor.

I posted about parsing an RSS feed in JavaScript the other day. I also posted about my RSS setup talking about how Feedbin is at the heart of it. Dave discovered that Feedbin can also produce an RSS feed for all your likes. Likes is a feature of Feedbin, and fortunately also NetNewsWire, which syncs …

It’s been over a year since the big WordPress launch of Gutenberg, the new editor. It seems to me most of the controversy around it has died down. There has been enough time that the UX and accessibility of it have improved, and people are seeing the potential a lot more clearly. There ain’t no …

A big checklist of things you could/should be doing to make your website the best it can be. 80% of which is a good idea for any website, not just a WordPress website. I’m linking to it because I like how plain language it is, and because it’s a good example of how giving something …