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Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity
16.7.2020
This is a masterclass from Dave:
After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives.
You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land...
Making lil’ me
15.7.2020
Cassie Evans made a lovely illustration of herself and then used Greensock to add a flourish of animations to polish it off. Cassie wrote a series of posts about how she did it:
In this post we’ll cover how to get values from the mouse movement and plug them into an animation. This is...
Make Jamstack Slow? Challenge Accepted.
15.7.2020
“Jamstack is slowwwww.” That’s not something you hear often, right? Especially, when one of the main selling points of Jamstack is performance. But yeah, it’s true that even a Jamstack site can suffer hits to performance just like any other site. 
Don’t think that by choosing Jamstack you...
Netlify Does Cache Invalidation For You
15.7.2020
This is one of my favorite Netlify features. Say you’re working on a site and you change as asset like a CSS, JavaScript, or image file. Ya know, like do our job. On Netlify, you don’t have to think about how that’s going to play out with deployment, browsers, and cache. Netlify...
Three CSS Alternatives to JavaScript Navigation
14.7.2020
Hey quick! You’ve gotta create the navigation for the site and you start working on the mobile behavior. What pattern do you choose? If you’re like most folks, it’s probably the “hamburger” menu that, when clicked, uses a little JavaScript to expand a vertical list of navigation links.
But that’s...
Open Prioritization
14.7.2020
Like Kickstarter, but for Web Platform Features.
That’s about the quickest way to sum up Open Prioritization from Igalia. Igalia is an independent company that works on browsers. They literally commit to all the different open source browsers to implement (and fix) features that we all use....
Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS
14.7.2020
I know this is a little outside the normal scope of CSS-Tricks stuff, but I find the whole concept of spot instances fascinating. Here’s the gist from a very-non-expert (me). You can just buy and pay for web servers, for example, Amazon EC2. You can save a bunch of money if you buy them...
My Long Journey to a Decoupled WordPress Gatsby Site
13.7.2020
As a professional research biologist, my playground used to be science laboratories filled with microscopes, petri dishes, and biology tools. Curiosity leads many scientists on their journey to discoveries. Mine led me to web design. I used to try learning HTML on my lab desktop while centrifuging...
Introducing Headless WordPress with Gatsby Cloud (Live Preview, Incremental Builds, and more!)
13.7.2020
The Gatsby team shipped an update to its source plugin for WordPress, graduating it to a beta release. The new version brings a new set of features to Gatsby’s headless WordPress configuration, which brings together WPGraphQL and WPGatsby to power a Gatsby front-end that pulls in data from...
Lazy Loaded Prefill Embeds
13.7.2020
Lemme sum this up:
CodePen has Embedded Pens. Build a Pen on CodePen, embed it on any other site.
We also offer Prefill Embeds, which remove that first step. With Prefill Embeds, the Pen doesn’t need to exist on CodePen at all. You pass in the code and settings you want to appear in...
An Eleventy Starter with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js
10.7.2020
When I decided to try to base my current personal website on Eleventy, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel: I tested all the Eleventy starters built with Tailwind CSS that I could find in Starter Projects from the documentation.
Many of the starters seemed to integrate Tailwind CSS in...
We need more inclusive web performance metrics
10.7.2020
Scott Jehl argues that performance metrics such as First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint don’t really capture the full picture of everyone’s experience with websites:
These metrics are often touted as measures of usability or meaning, but they are not necessarily meaningful...
Memorize Scroll Position Across Page Loads
9.7.2020
Hakim El Hattab tweeted a really nice little UX enhancement for a static site that includes a scrollable sidebar of navigation.
???? If you've got a static site with a scrollable sidebar, it really helps to memorize the scroll position across page loads.
(left is default, right memorized)...
Building a Blog with Next.js
9.7.2020
In this article, we will use Next.js to build a static blog framework with the design and structure inspired by Jekyll. I’ve always been a big fan of how Jekyll makes it easier for beginners to setup a blog and at the same time also provides a great degree of control over every aspect of...
Frontity is React for WordPress
9.7.2020
Some developers just prefer working in React. I don’t blame them really, because I like React too. Maybe that’s what they learned first. I’ve been using it long enough there is just some comfort to it. But mostly it is the strong component model that I like. There is just...
A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot
8.7.2020
Julia Evans:
I decided to implement almost all of the UI by just adding & removing CSS classes, and using CSS transitions if I want to animate a transition.
An awful lot of the JavaScript on sites (that aren’t otherwise entirely constructed from JavaScript) is click the thing...
How to Make a List Component with Emotion
8.7.2020
I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring this week at Sentry and I noticed that we didn’t have a generic List component that we could use across projects and features. So, I started one, but here’s the rub: we style things at Sentry using Emotion, which I have only passing experience with and...
How to delete all node_modules directories from your computer
8.7.2020
Nice tip from Chris Ferdinandi:
My node_modules directories contained 50mb of stuff on the small side, and over 200mb of files in some cases. Over a few dozen projects, that really adds up!
Two dozen projects with 200 MB worth of node_modules? That’s nearly 5 GB of space for...
Displaying the Current Step with CSS Counters
8.7.2020
Say you have five buttons. Each button is a step. If you click on the fourth button, you’re on step 4 of 5, and you want to display that.
This kind of counting and displaying could be hard-coded, but that’s no fun. JavaScript could do this job as well. But CSS? Hmmmm. Can it? CSS...
WooCommerce on CSS-Tricks
7.7.2020
I always get all excited when I accomplish something, but I get extra excited when I get it done and think, “well, that was easy.” As much as I enjoy fiddling with technology, I enjoy reaping the benefit of well set-up technology even more. That’s why I still get so excited about...