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Gatsby and WordPress
31.12.2019
Gatsby and WordPress is an interesting combo to watch. On one hand, it makes perfect sense. Gatsby can suck up data from anywhere, and with WordPress having a native REST API, it makes for a good pairing. Of course Gatsby has a first-class plugin for sourcing data from WordPress that even supports...
Raw GraphQL Querying
20.12.2019
GraphQL has all kinds of awesome tooling built around it. But like everything on the web, it ultimately comes down to data shootin' across the ol' network and responses coming back. If you need to talk to a GraphQL API endpoint, you don't absolutely have to use some kind of framework or library...
Zenserp
19.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
There are plenty of rank tracking software tools out there that allow you to track the position of your website inside the search results pages (SERP) of search engines for certain key phrases. However, these tools are definitely not enough when you are trying...
Alchemy Publicly Launches Its Blockchain API After Raising $15 Million
18.12.2019
Blockchain firm Alchemy publicly launched its API after securing $15 million in funding
css.gg
18.12.2019
I'm not sure what to call these icons from Astrit Malsija. The title is "500+ CSS Icons, Customizable, Retina Ready & API" and the URL is "css.gg" but they aren't really named anything.
Anyway, their shtick is:
The 🌎's first icon library designed by code.
The idea is that they don't...
Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems
17.12.2019
A clever idea from Matthew Ström:
[...] design APIs don’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. An API-driven approach is the natural extension of the work currently being done on design systems, including tokens and standardization projects.
If you buy into the idea of design tokens, that...
Dip Your Toes Into Hardware With WebMIDI
12.12.2019
Did you know there is a well-supported browser API that allows you to interface with interesting and even custom-built hardware using a mature protocol that predates the web? Let me introduce you to MIDI and the WebMIDI API and show you how it presents a unique opportunity for front-end developers...
Dash Decides to Update Dash Explorer to Improved Insight API
4.12.2019
Decentralized payment solution Dash will update Dash Explorer to “new and improved” Insight API
An Introduction to the Picture-in-Picture Web API
26.11.2019
Picture-in-Picture made its first appearance on the web in the Safari browser with the release of macOS Sierra in 2016. It made it possible for a user to pop a video out into a small floating window that stays above all others, so that they can keep watching while doing other things. It’s an idea...
We are Programmers
22.11.2019
Building websites is programming. Writing HTML and CSS is programming. I am a programmer, and if you're here, reading CSS-Tricks, chances are you're a programmer, too.
The thing is, the details in programming layout with CSS are different, for example, than the details in programming API endpoints...
Weekly Platform News: Contrast Ratio Range, replaceAll Method, Native File System API
22.11.2019
In this week's roundup: Firefox's new contrast checker, a simpler way to lasso substrings in a string, and a new experimental API that will let apps fiddle with a user's local files.
Firefox shows the contrast ratio range for text on a multicolored background
According to Success Criterion 1.4.3...
The Typed Object Model
20.11.2019
I help write technical documentation and one feature I've been writing about this year that has really stood out is the Typed Object Model (or Typed OM). If you haven't come across it yet you would be forgiven as it's pretty new. It falls under the CSS Houdini suite of API's and on the surface...
serpstack
19.11.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Is it your job to keep an eye on your company's search engine placement? Or your clients? Or are you building a tool to do just that? Manually Googling stuff isn't going to scale particularly well there. Wouldn't it be nice if you could hit an API and it would return...
Real-Time Google Search Results API with serpstack (Sponsored)
19.11.2019
In my early web days, I was interested in scraping and collecting data based on the results of Google searches. Scraping Google was easier in those days but now Google search results are so dynamic that you can’t rely on getting the same HTML or data structure back. Add in CAPTCHAs, rate...
The Kind of Development I Like
18.11.2019
I'm turning 40 next year (yikes!) and even though I've been making websites for over 25 years, I feel like I'm finally beginning to understand the kind of development I like. Expectedly, these are not new revelations and my views can be summed up by two older Computer Science adages that pre-date...
An Early Look at the Vue 3 Composition API in the Wild
13.11.2019
I recently had an opportunity to try the new Vue Composition API in a real project to check where it might be useful and how we could use it in the future.
Until now, when we were creating a new component we were using Options API. That API forced us to separate the component’s code by options...
Making an Audio Waveform Visualizer with Vanilla JavaScript
12.11.2019
As a UI designer, I’m constantly reminded of the value of knowing how to code. I pride myself on thinking of the developers on my team while designing user interfaces. But sometimes, I step on a technical landmine.
A few years ago, as the design director of wsj.com, I was helping to re-design...
scrapestack: An API for Scraping Sites
12.11.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Not every site has an API to access data from it. Most don't, in fact. If you need to pull that data, one approach is to "scrape" it. That is, load the page in web browser (that you automate), find what you are looking for in the DOM, and take it.
You can do this...
Query JSON documents in the Terminal with GROQ
7.11.2019
JSON documents are everywhere today, but they are rarely structured the way you want them to be. They often include too much data, have weirdly named fields, or place the data in unnecessary nested objects. Graph-Relational Object Queries (GROQ) is a query language (like SQL, but different) which...
Simple Scraping API with zenscrape (Sponsored)
5.11.2019
So many developers believe that scraping a URL’s content is easy — just a simple curl and you’re done, right? Nope. CAPTCHAs, rate limitations, origin-specific limitations — they make getting content off the web a nightmare. Luckily we now have services like zenscrape which...