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The Amazingly Useful Tools from Yoksel
15.11.2019
I find myself web searching for some tool by Yoksel at least every month. I figured I'd list out some of my favorites here in case you aren't aware of them.
Need to duo-tone an image? SVG filters can do that. Lentie Ward wrote about it for us, and Yoksel has a tool to create the filters...
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...
How to Create a QR Code
15.10.2019
QR codes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea but I quite like them. If I see something I want to remember or check out later, especially when on the road, it’s super easy to take a quick picture — it’s much easier than trying to remember a URL and much faster than typing...
Where should “Subscribe to Podcast” link to?
14.9.2019
For a while, iTunes was the big dog in podcasting, so if you linked "Subscribe to Podcast" to like:
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id493890455
...that would make sense. It's a web URL anyway, so it will work for anyone and has information about the podcast, as well as a list of recent shows...
Creating a Maintainable Icon System with Sass
28.8.2019
One of my favorite ways of adding icons to a site is by including them as data URL background images to pseudo-elements (e.g. ::after) in my CSS. This technique offers several advantages:
They don't require any additional HTTP requests other than the CSS file.
Using the background-size property...
Front Conference in Zürich
15.8.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
I'm so excited to be heading to Zürich, Switzerland for Front Conference (Love that name and URL!). I've never been to Switzerland before, so I'm excited about that, but of course, the web nerd in me is excited to be at the conference with lots of fellow webfolk. Some...
Zoom, CORS, and the Web
23.7.2019
It's sorta sad by funny that that big Zoom vulnerability thing was ultimately related to web technology and not really the app itself.
There is this idea of custom protocols or "URL schemes." So, like gittower:// or dropbox:// or whatever. A native app can register them, then URLs that hit them...
Managing Multiple Backgrounds with Custom Properties
15.7.2019
One cool thing about CSS custom properties is that they can be a part of a value. Let's say you're using multiple backgrounds to pull off a a design. Each background will have its own color, image, repeat, position, etc. It can be verbose!
You have four images:
body {
background-position:
...
Weekly Platform News: HTML Inspection in Search Console, Global Scope of Scripts, Babel env Adds defaults Query
11.7.2019
In this week's look around the world of web platform news, Google Search Console makes it easier to view crawled markup, we learn that custom properties aren't computing hogs, variables defined at the top-level in JavaScript are global to other page scripts, and Babel env now supports the defaults...
Spam Detection APIs
25.6.2019
I was trying to research the landscape of these the other day — And by research, I mean light Googling and asking on Twitter. Weirdly, very little comes to mind when thinking about spam detection APIs. I mean some kind of URL endpoint, paid or not, where you can hit it with a block of text...
Spam Detection APIs
25.6.2019
I was trying to research the landscape of these the other day — And by research, I mean light Googling and asking on Twitter. Weirdly, very little comes to mind when thinking about spam detection APIs. I mean some kind of URL endpoint, paid or not, where you can hit it with a block of text...
Decaying Sites
4.4.2019
Websites have a tendency to decay all by themselves. Link rot, they call it. Unpaid domain name registrations. Companies that have gone out of business. Site owners that have lost interest. What's sadder than a 404? Landing on a holding page of a URL that used to exist, but now has fallen into...
Multiple Background Clip
30.1.2019
You know how you can have multiple backgrounds?
body {
background-image:
url(image-one.jpg),
url(image-two.jpg);
}
That's just background-image. You can set their position too, as you might expect. We'll shorthand it:
body {
background:
url(image-one.jpg) no-repeat top right,
...
New CodePen Feature: Prefill Embeds
21.1.2019
I've very excited to have this feature released for CodePen. It's very progressive enhancement friendly in the sense that you can take any <pre> block of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or any combination of them) and enhance it into an embed, meaning you can see the rendered output. It also...
itty.bitty
9.7.2018
Mark this down as one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a good long while. Nicholas Jitkoff has made a tool called itty.bitty that creates websites with all of the assets being contained within their own link. You can create a website without any HTML or CSS resources at all because it’s...
Don’t just copy the @font-face out of Google Fonts URLs
19.6.2018
I don't think this is an epidemic or anything, but I've seen it done a few times and even advocated for. This is what I mean...
You go to Google Fonts and pick a font like Open Sans, and it gives you either a <link> or an @import with a URL there in which to ready this font for usage...
How to Delete Untracked Files in a Mercurial Repository
29.5.2018
Working around Firefox at Mozilla means that you need to get acquainted with mercurial, the version control system that rivals git and svn. Like any tool, hg (mercurial) can be difficult until you’re well versed with it. And if you hg import a URL that doesn’t match up with...
Where Lines Break is Complicated. Here’s all the Related CSS and HTML.
9.5.2018
Say you have a really long word within some text inside an element that isn't wide enough to hold it. A common cause of that is a long URL finding it's way into copy. What happens? It depends on the CSS. How that CSS is controlling the layout and what the CSS is telling the text to do.
This...