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How to Make Repeating Border Images
16.3.2020
I just saw this cool little site from Max Bittker: broider. You design an image on a 9-slice grid (except the middle part) and it will produce an image for you to use with border-image along with the CSS to copy and paste.
Check out my little design:
CodePen Embed Fallback
The areas of the image...
Make Yourself a Little API With Netlify Functions
10.3.2020
Here's an example of a nice little use case for cloud functions. Glitch has this great package of friendly words. Say you wanted to randomly generate "happy-elephant" or "walking-tree", and you need to do that on your website in JavaScript. Well, this package is pretty big (~200 KB), necessarily...
The 3 Laws of Serverless
6.3.2020
Burke Holland thinks that to "build applications without thinking about servers" is a pretty good way to describe serverless, but...
Nobody really thinks about servers when they are writing their code. I mean, I doubt any developer has ever thrown up their hands and said “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait...
Selectors Explained
2.3.2020
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:
.site-footer__nav a:hover svg ellipse:first-child { }
At the end of it, I honestly couldn't...
monica.css
20.2.2020
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...
Listen to your web pages
16.2.2020
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...
“CSS4” Update
16.2.2020
Since I first chimed in on the CSS4¹ thing, there's been tons of more discussion on it. I'm going to round up my favorite thoughts from others here. There is an overwhelming amount of talk about this, so I'm going to distill it here down as far as I can, hopefully making it easier to follow.
Jen...
While You Weren’t Looking, CSS Gradients Got Better
14.2.2020
One thing that caught my eye on the list of features for Lea Verou's conic-gradient() polyfill was the last item:
Supports double position syntax (two positions for the same color stop, as a shortcut for two consecutive color stops with the same color)
Surprisingly, I recently discovered most...
Collective #589
13.2.2020
Toward Responsive Elements * The wonderful sound of an atomic commit * OpenChakra * drop.lol * GitHub CLI beta
Collective #589 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Ethereum vs Tron: Comparing Data, Defi and Stablecoins from Both Chains After Viral Tweet
9.2.2020
On February 7, Cold Card and Opendime creator, Rodolfo Novak (also known as NVK), tweeted a picture of himself with Tron founder Justin Sun and Blockstream’s CEO Adam Back. Novak said “Ethereum was over” and the three had a plan to move Tron to Liquid, a network that leverages...
Guillermo’s 2019 in Review
7.2.2020
Of all the tech-focused year-in-review posts I read, Guillermo Rauch's is my favorite. There is a lot in there, jumping from topics like modern architectures, high-fiving specific apps, and philosophical movements.
I'll pick one quote about the rise of "deploy previews":
A salient feature is...
Innovation Can’t Keep the Web Fast
31.1.2020
Every so often, the fruits of innovation bear fruit in the form of improvements to the foundational layers of the web. In 2015, HTTP/2 became a published standard in an effort to update an aging protocol. This was was both necessary and overdue, as HTTP/1 rendered web performance as an arcane sort...
Going Beyond Automatic SVG Compression With the “use” Element
27.1.2020
If you draw your own SVG files or if you download them from the internet, tools like this SVG-Editor or SVGOMG are your friends. Compressing the files with those tools takes only few seconds and reduces your file size a lot. But if you need to use your SVG inline to animate or interact with...
Simple Image Placeholders with SVG
27.1.2020
A little open-source utility from Tyler Sticka that returns a data URL of an SVG to use as an image placeholder as needed.
I like the idea of self-running utilities like that, rather than depending on some third-party service, like placekitten or whatever. Not that I'd advocate for feature...
“Browser Functions”
26.1.2020
Serverless functions are fairly straightforward. Put a bit of back-end language code, like Node, in the cloud and communicate with it via URL. But what if that URL didn't run a back-end language, it ran an actual browser? Richard Young:
We can now do full stack development using just Web APIs....
Playwright
24.1.2020
So Microsoft launches a Node-based browser automation project called Playwright. It allows you to spin up a headless version of a browser and control it. Go here! Click something! Take a screenshot! That kind of stuff. Particularly useful for testing.
It's just like Google's Puppeteer, only...
JAMstack vs. Jamstack
21.1.2020
It's just a word to evoke the idea that serving as much as you can statically while using client-side code and hitting serverless APIs for any needs after that.
The "official website" changed their language from JAMstack (evoking the JavaScript, APIs, and Markup acronym) to Jamstack. It's nothing...
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...
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...