Web Development + Follow

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 …

The problem: you click a jump link like <a href=”#header-3″>Jump</a> which links to something like <h3 id=”header-3″>Header</h3>. That’s totally fine, until you have a position: fixed; header at the top of the page obscuring the header you’re trying to link to! Fixed headers have a nasty habit of hiding the element you’re trying to link …

Here’s a heartwarming post from Stephanie Stimac on her experience teaching kids the very basics of web development: … the response from that class of high school students delighted me and grounded me in a way I haven’t experienced before. What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all …

Erik Kennedy wrote up a bunch of design advice for designing for the iPhone. Like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, only illustrated and readable, says Erik. This is mostly for native iOS apps kinda stuff, but it makes me wonder how much of this is expected when doing a mobile Progressive Web App. On one hand, …

Every once in a while I’m motivated to attempt to draw some shapes with <path>, the all-powerful drawing syntax of SVG. I only understand a fragment of what it all can do, but I know enough to be dangerous. All the straight-line syntax commands (like L) are pretty straightforward and I find the curved Q …

The developer’s debugging console has been available in one form or another in web browsers for many years. Starting out as a means for errors to be reported to the developer, its capabilities have increased in many ways; such as automatically logging information like network requests, network responses, security errors or warnings. There is also …

The advantages of using SVGs in web development are well known. SVGs are small in size, can be made quite accessible, are scalable while maintaining their quality, and can be animated. Still, there is a learning curve. Things, like the syntax of SVG, can be a little tricky and having to hand-alter SVG code sometimes …

Are you looking for a tech job where you clock in, or for a career where you’ll be seen? Seen by Indeed is a matching service for software engineers, product managers and other tech pros that sorts through thousands of companies — like Twilio, Overstock, VRBO, and PayPal — and matches tech talent like you to …

There are special superset number characters that are sometimes perfect for footnotes. Here they are: ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ I generally prefer to superscript the number myself, like:

In the video embedded below, Jen Simmons explains how to improve image loading by using width and height attributes. The issue is that there’s a lot of jank when an image is first loaded because an img will naturally have a height of 0 before the image asset has been successfully downloaded by the browser. …

Monica Dinculescu: I don’t want every possible padding and margin and colour and flexbox configuration in the world. I just want the ones that I know I end up using in every project. So here is monica.css: my very own CSS framework, which I copy paste at the beginning of every CSS file and take it …

What should you do when you get a complaint about the color contrast in your web design? It might seem perfectly fine to you because you’re able to read content throughout the site, but to someone else, it might be a totally different experience. How can put yourself in that person’s shoes to improve their …

Ahmad Shadeed covers the idea of a card component that has a fixed set of semantic HTML with some BEMy classes on it. There is a title, author, image, and tags. Then he redesigns the card into five totally different designs without touching any of the HTML just the CSS. If this is an ah-ha …

Andrew Welch had a little CSS challenge the other day to make an ordinary div: • centered vertically + horizontally• scales to fit the viewport w/ a margin around it• maintains an arbitrary aspect ratio• No JS There’s a video in that tweet if it helps you visualize the challenge. I saw Paul Bakaus blogging …

Mezo Istvan does a good job of covering the problem and a solution to it in a blog post on Medium.
If you tap on something that has a :hover state but you don’t leave the page then, on a mobile device, there is a chance that :hover state “sticks.” You’ll see this with stuff like jump-links used as tabs or buttons that trigger on-page functionality.

The inline-template directive allows us to build rich Vue components as a progressive enhancement over existing WordPress markup.

We’ll get to that, but first, a long-winded introduction. I’m still not in a confident place knowing a good time to use native web components. The templating isn’t particularly robust, so that doesn’t draw me in. There is no state management, and I like having standard ways of handling that. If I’m using another library …

Everything you ever wanted to know about data attributes in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I recently wrote an article explaining how you can create a countdown timer using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Now, let’s look at how we can make that a reusable component by porting it into Vue using basic features that the framework provides. Why do this at all? Well there are few reasons, but two stand out in particular: Keeping UI in sync with the timer state: If you look …

I’m not sure we’ve gotten much better at this since Tim Kadlec wrote this in 2012: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “Responsive design is bad for performance.”“User agent detection is bad. Don’t segment the web.”“Hybrid apps don’t work as well as native apps.”“CSS preprocessors shouldn’t be used because they create bloated CSS.” …

A clever idea from Tom Hicks combining MutationObserver (which can “observe” changes to elements like when their attributes, text, or children change) and the Web Audio API for creating sounds. Plop this code into the console on a page where you’d like to listen to essentially any DOM change to hear it doing stuff.