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positionstack
21.1.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
Say you have an address that your user typed in, like
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, USA
and now you need more information about it. Maybe you need the proper country code. Maybe you need the latitude and longitude. Maybe you need the postal code....
How to Turn a Procreate Drawing into a Web Animation
20.1.2020
I recently started drawing on my iPad using the Procreate app with Apple Pencil. I’m enjoying the flexibility of drawing this way. What usually keeps me from painting at home are basic things, like setup, cleaning brushes, proper ventilation, and other factors not really tied to the painting...
The Best Color Functions in CSS?
20.1.2020
I've said before that HSL is the best color format we have. Most of us aren't like David DeSandro, who can read hex codes. HSL(a) is Hue, Saturation, Lightness, and alpha, if we need it.
hsl(120, 100%, 40%)
Hue isn't intuitive, but it's not that weird. You take a trip around the color wheel from...
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
The Modern Lovers
20.1.2020
I love stuff like this.
The Modern Lovers, a rock band in the 70's, play a show in Boston, probably having some poster of their own for the show.
Mike Joyce is inspired by the music and combines his love of it with the design style of Swiss Modernism to create a new poster for it.
Pete Barr...
Timeless Web Dev Articles
18.1.2020
Pavithra Kodmad asked people for recommendations on what they thought were some of the most timeless articles about web development that have changed their perspective in some way. Fun! I'm gonna scour the thread and link up my favorites (that are actually articles, although not all of them...
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...