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Why CSS Needs its Own Survey
1.3.2019
2016 was only three years ago, but that’s almost a whole other era in web development terms. The JavaScript landscape was in turmoil, with up-and-comer React — as well as a little-known framework called Vue — fighting to dethrone Angular.
Like many other developers, I felt lost. I needed some...
Recreating the Facebook Messenger Gradient Effect with CSS
1.3.2019
One Sunday morning, I woke up a little earlier than I would’ve liked to, thanks to the persistent buzzing of my phone. I reached out, tapped into Facebook Messenger, and joined the conversation. Pretty soon my attention went from the actual conversations to the funky gradient effect of the message...
I Spun up a Scalable WordPress Server Environment with Trellis, and You Can, Too
28.2.2019
A few years back, my fledgling website design agency was starting to take shape; however, we had one problem: managing clients' web servers and code deployments. We were unable to build a streamlined process of provisioning servers and maintaining operating system security patches. We had...
Keen makes it a breeze to build and ship customer-facing metrics
28.2.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Keen is an analytics tool that makes it wonderfully easy to collect data. But Keen is unique in that it is designed not just to help you look at that data, but to share that data with your own customers! Customer-facing metrics, as it were.
Keen works just the way...
A Bit of Performance
28.2.2019
Here’s a great post by Roman Komarov on what he learned by improving the performance of his personal website. There’s a couple of neat things he does to tackle font loading in particular, such as adding the <link rel="preload"> tags for fonts. This will encourage those font files...
Get File MIME Type from Command Line
28.2.2019
I’ve gotten skilled at shell scripting over the years. I love a good GUI but knowing how to automate makes you a much more powerful engineer. Much of my scripting requires recursing over directories and processing a file if it meets a given criteria, which is often file extension or MIME...
WorldWideWeb
27.2.2019
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp...
Did you know that CSS Custom Properties can handle images too?
27.2.2019
So you might be aware of CSS Custom Properties that let you set a variable, such as a theme color, and then apply it to multiple classes like this:
:root {
--theme: #777;
}
.alert {
background: var(—-theme);
}
.button {
background: var(—-theme);
}
Well, I had seen this pattern so often...
Text Wrapping & Inline Pseudo Elements
27.2.2019
I love posts like this. It's just about adding a little icon to the end of certain links, but it ends up touching on a million things along the way. I think this is an example of why some people find front-end fun and some people rather dislike it.
Things involved:
Cool [attribute] selectors that...
Control Icons with Font Size
27.2.2019
Here’s a nifty trick from Andy Bell that now seems a little obvious in hindsight: if you set an SVG to have a width and height of 1em then you can change the size of it with the font-size property.
Try and change the font-size on the body element below to see the icon scale with the text:
...
Six tips for better web typography
27.2.2019
How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read...
Typography for Developers
27.2.2019
This is intended as a practical guide for developers to learn web typography. We’ll cover a range of practical and useful topics, like how to choose and use custom fonts on the web, but more importantly, how to lay text out to create a pleasant user experience. We’ll go over the principles...
What We Want from Grid
27.2.2019
We felt spoiled with CSS grid for a minute there. It arrived hot and fast in all the major browsers all at once. Now that we're seeing a lot more usage, we're seeing people want more from grid.
Michelle Barker lists hers wants (and I'll put my commentary after):
Styling row and column gaps. I've...
Look Ma, No Media Queries! Responsive Layouts Using CSS Grid
27.2.2019
Not only has CSS Grid reshaped the way we think and build layouts for the web, but it has also contributed to writing more resilient code, replacing "hacky" techniques we've used before, and in some cases, killing the need to rely on code for specific resolutions and viewports. What's so cool about...
Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Building a Flexible Grid System
26.2.2019
Last time, we looked at a few possible approaches for declaring and using CSS custom properties in responsive designs. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at CSS variables and how to use them in reusable components and modules. We will learn how to make our variables optional and set fallback...
Moving a Self-Hosted WordPress Site to WordPress.com
26.2.2019
I have a habit of getting some hosting when I need a new WordPress site. That is, a self-installed, self-hosted WordPress.org site. That's served me well over the years. I like my control. But along with that control comes a certain level of extra responsibility that sometimes just isn't worth...
SVG Filter Effects: Moving Forward
26.2.2019
In this last article of our SVG Filter Effects series, we share a list of useful resources to learn more about SVG Filters.
SVG Filter Effects: Moving Forward was written by Sara Soueidan and published on Codrops
iconsvg.xyz
25.2.2019
There is a lot to like about Gaddafi Rusli's ICONSVG.
It provides inline <svg>, which is the most generically useful way to deliver them, and probably how they should be used anyway. Each icon is a tiny amount of SVG and I'd bet they were all hand-golfed.
They are all stroke-based, so they...
Dealing with overflow and position: sticky;
25.2.2019
Any overflow value other than visible and no height is the enemy of child elements with position: sticky;. It's like that element is ready to stick when the parent scrolls, but it never does because the height is unconstrained. Adding a fixed height can solve the issue, but that's not always...
Responsive Designs and CSS Custom Properties: Defining Variables and Breakpoints
25.2.2019
CSS custom properties (a.k.a. CSS variables) are becoming more and more popular. They finally reached decent browser support and are slowly making their way into various production environments. The popularity of custom properties shouldn’t come as a surprise, because they can be really helpful...