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Eleventy Love
17.1.2020
Been seeing a lot of Eleventy action lately. It's a smaller player in the world of static site generators, but I think it's got huge potential because of how simple it is, yet does about anything you'd need it to do. It's Just JavaScript™.
Jason Lengstorf and Zach Leatherman did a Learn...
Autumn (macOS window manager)
17.1.2020
I love how nerdy this is. Autumn allows you to write JavaScript to control your windows. Get this window, move it over here. Nudge this window over. There are all sorts of APIs, like keyboard command helpers and doing things on events, like waking up from sleep.
I love that it exists, but for...
Third-Party Components at Their Best
16.1.2020
I'm a fan of the componentization of the web. I think it's a very nice way to build a website at just about any scale (except, perhaps, the absolute most basic). There are no shortage of opinions about what makes a good component, but say we scope that to third-party for a moment. That...
NetNewsWire and Feedbin
16.1.2020
NetNewsWire is one of the classic RSS apps, debuting in 2002. I was pretty stoked when it went 5.0 and was open-sourced in August 2019! You can snag it right here. (Sorry, Mac only.)
It's super nice, is fast, and looks great. It has just the right features.
But... I thought, at least at first...
Thinking Through Styling Options for Web Components
16.1.2020
Where do you put styles in web components?
I'm assuming that we're using the Shadow DOM here as, to me, that's one of the big draws of a web component: a platform thing that is a uniquely powerful thing the platform can do. So this is about defining styles for a web component in a don't-leak-out...
The Design Squiggle
16.1.2020
I think we all have an intuitive understanding that, at the beginning of projects that require our creativity (be it design or code), things feel uncertain and messy. Then, as we go, things tend to straighten out. There is still some wiggling and setbacks, but by the end, we find a single solution...
How We Tagged Google Fonts and Created goofonts.com
16.1.2020
GooFonts is a side project signed by a developer-wife and a designer-husband, both of them big fans of typography. We’ve been tagging Google Fonts and built a website that makes searching through and finding the right font easier.
GooFonts uses WordPress in the back end...
A Web Component with Different HTML for Desktop and Mobile
16.1.2020
Christian Schaefer has a great big write-up about dealing with web advertisements. The whole thing is interesting, first documenting all the challenges that ads present, and then presenting modern solutions to each of them.
One code snippet that caught my eye was a simple way to design a component...
The Deal with the Section Element
15.1.2020
Two articles published the exact same day:
Bruce Lawson on Smashing Magazine: Why You Should Choose HTML5 <article> Over <section>
Adam Laki on Pine: The Difference Between <section> and <div> Element
They are comparing slightly different things, but they both...
Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React
15.1.2020
I find it notable when the blog of a major accessibility-focused company like Deque publishes an article called Debunking the Myth: Accessibility and React. Mark Steadman is essentially saying if a site has bad accessibility, it ain't React... it's you. The tools are there to achieve good...
How many CSS properties are there?
15.1.2020
Tomasz Łakomy posted a joke tweet about naming all the CSS attributes and Tejas Kumar replied with a joke answer, going as far as making an npm module. You can even run a terminal command to see them:
npx get-all-css-properties
You'll get 259 of them. The source code uses the website quackit.com...
Business Dad
15.1.2020
Congrats to Chris Enns, our podcast editor on ShopTalk and CodePen Radio, for landing a really cool new podcast to edit: Business Dad. It's Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, talking to dads. The first episode is with Hasan Minhaj(!)
Speaking of podcasting, Dave wrote up his thoughts...
A Trick That Makes Drawing SVG Lines Way Easier
14.1.2020
When drawing lines with SVG, you often have a <path> element with a stroke. You set a stroke-dasharray that is as long as the path itself, as well as a stroke-offset that extends so far that you that it's initially hidden. Then you animate the stroke-offset back to 0 so you can watch...
In Defence of “Serverless” —the term
14.1.2020
Ben Ellerby:
For now Serverless, to me at least, manages to do a hard job, defining the borders of a very fluid and complex space of possible solutions in which we can build next-generation architectures. It would help if there was not a framework of the same name, it would help if people didn’t...
Netlify High-Fives
14.1.2020
We've got Netlify as a sponsor around here again this year, which is just fantastic. Big fan. Our own Sarah Drasner is Head of DX (Developer Experience) over there, if you hadn't heard. And if you haven't heard of Netlify, well, you're in for a treat. It's a web host, but for your jamstack sites...
Snowpack
14.1.2020
Snowpack. Love that name. This is the new thing from the Pika people, who are on to something. It's a bundler alternative, in a sense. It runs over packages you pull from npm to make sure that they are ES module-compatible (native imports).
This is how I digest it. When you write a line of code...
Animate Text on Scroll
13.1.2020
We covered the idea of animating curved text not long ago when a fun New York Times article came out. All I did was peek into how they did it and extract the relevant parts to a more isolated demo.
That demo is here:
See the Pen
Selfie Crawl by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
...
A Scandal in Bohemia
13.1.2020
I love that Paravel is so busy doing so much cool stuff they literally just forgot that they built this and are just now releasing it.
It's a Sherlock Holmes story, but designed to be more interesting and immersive (even audio!) than just words-on-a-screen.
Direct Link to Article —...
How to Animate on the Web With Greensock
13.1.2020
There are truly thousands of ways to animate on the web. We’ve covered a comparison of different animation technologies here before. Today, we’re going to dive into a step-by-step guide of one of my favorite ways to get it done: using GreenSock.
(They don’t pay me or anything, I just really enjoy...
Why do we have different programming languages?
13.1.2020
"But why do I have to learn Python?" She wailed, "I like Scratch!"
"I know," I said, "But there are different programming languages for different sorts of tasks."
"That's stupid" she said
I can empathize with the little girl in Terence Eden's story. In high school, I got super into Turbo Pascal....