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Comparing Static Site Generator Build Times
28.10.2020
There are so many static site generators (SSGs). It’s overwhelming trying to decide where to start. While an abundance of helpful articles may help wade through the (popular) options, they don’t magically make the decision easy.
I’ve been on a quest to help make that decision easier. A colleague...
Using JavaScript to Adjust Saturation and Brightness of RGB Colors
6.10.2020
Lately I’ve been taking a look into designing with color (or “colour” as we spell it where I’m from in New Zealand). Looking at Adam Wathan and Steve Schroger’s advice on the subject, we find that we’re going to need more than just five nice looking hex codes from a color palette...
Some New Icon Sets
29.9.2020
I’ve bookmarked some icon sets lately, partly because I can never find a nice set when I need to. I figured I’d even go the extra mile here and blog them so I can definitely find them later. Aside from being nice, cohesive, and practical sets of icons, I find it interesting that...
Supercharging Number Inputs
4.9.2020
Speaking of number scrubbing (i.e. adding mouse UX to number inputs), you can also add better keyboard commands to number inputs. Kilian Valkhof explains how he added up and down arrows to a number input, as well as modifier keys to change how much the keys increment the value, like Emmet does....
This vs. That
24.8.2020
Here’s a nice site from Phuoc Nguyen, who I’ve noted before has quite a knack for clever sites. This vs. That pits different related concepts against each other as a theme for an article. For example, CSS has display: none;, opacity: 0;, and visibility: hidden; and they all, on...
Optimize Images with a GitHub Action
20.8.2020
I was playing with GitHub Actions the other day. Such a nice tool! Short story: you can have it run code for you, like run your build processes, tests, and deployments. But it’s just configuration files that can run whatever you need. There is a whole marketplace of Actions wanting to do work...
What Happens When Border Radii Overlap?
17.8.2020
I’d wager that most times we’re rounding box corners in CSS, we’re applying a uniform border-radius value across the border. It’s a nice touch of polish in many designs. But there are times when we might want different radii for different corners. Easy, right? That way the property takes four...
Warp SVG Online
6.8.2020
The warping is certainly the cool part here. Some fancy math literally transforms the path data to do the warping. But the UX detail work here is just as nice. Scrolling the page zooms in and out via a transform: scale() on the SVG wrapper (clever!). Likewise, holding the spacebar lets you...
How to Earn Interest with Bitcoin
5.8.2020
When I was young I remember looking at my bank book and seeing nice interest payments for cash I had in the bank. Fast forward to today and banks are giving essentially nothing for interest — your money just sits there collecting dust. In an ideal world you could put it into the stock market...
Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS
27.7.2020
Sometimes our sites need a little sprinkling of content management. Not always. Not a lot. But a bit. The CMS market is thriving with affordable, approachable products, so we’re not short of options. Thankfully, it is a very different world to the one that used to force companies to splash out...
Reactive jQuery for Spaghetti-fied Legacy Codebases (or When You Can’t Have Nice Things)
22.7.2020
I can hear you crying out now: “Why on Earth would you want to use jQuery when there are much better tools available? Madness! What sort of maniac are you?” These are reasonable questions, and I’ll answer them with a little bit of context.
In my current job, I am responsible for the care...
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)...
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...
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...
USA.css
6.7.2020
Lots of fun with gradients from Bennet Feely: stars, stripes, banners, bursts… I love being able to use nice patterns with either no image requests at all, or very little SVG.
And important reminder: Bennet does all sorts of cool stuff. I’ve probably used Clippy about a million times....
The Return of the 90s Web
26.6.2020
One of my forever-lessons here on CSS-Tricks is that having your own website and blogging on it is a good idea. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, as it’s been a direct source of fun, career development and, eventually, income.
I always chuckle at little...
Just another +1 for subgrid
19.6.2020
I’d say 85% of my grid usage is in one of these two categories…
I just need some pretty basic (probably equal width) columns that ends up being something like like grid-template-columns: repeat(3, minmax(0, 1fr)); to be safe.
Actually doing some real layout where five minutes in...
Everything You Need to Know About FLIP Animations in React
16.6.2020
With a very recent Safari update, Web Animations API (WAAPI) is now supported without a flag in all modern browsers (except IE).  Here’s a handy Pen where you can check which features your browser supports. The WAAPI is a nice way to do animation (that needs to be done in JavaScript) because...
Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools
5.6.2020
It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows...
Chrome 83 Form Element Styles
3.6.2020
There have been some aesthetic changes to what form elements look like as of Chrome 83. Anything with gradient colorization is gone (notably the extra-shiny <meter stuff). The consistency across the board is nice, particularly between inputs and textareas. Not a big fan of the new <select...