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Color Theming with CSS Custom Properties and Tailwind
19.11.2020
Custom properties not only enable us to make our code more efficient, but allow us to work some real magic with CSS too. One area where they have huge potential is theming. At Atomic Smash we use Tailwind CSS, a utility class framework, for writing our styles. In this article, we’ll look at...
grid-auto-flow : CSS Grid :: flex-direction : Flexbox
19.11.2020
When setting a parent element to display: flex, its child elements align left-to-right like this:
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Now, one of the neat things we can do with flexbox is change the direction so that child elements are stacked vertically on top of each other in a column. We can do that with...
Firefox 83
19.11.2020
There’s a small line in the changelog that is is big news for CSS:
We’ve added support for CSS Conic Gradients (bug 1632351) and (bug 1175958).
🎉🎉🎉
Conic gradients are circular, just like their radial counterpart, but place color stops...
Thinking Outside the Box with CSS Grid
19.11.2020
Great tutorial from Alex Trost (based on some demos, like this one, from Andy Barefoot) showcasing how, while CSS grid has straight grid lines across and down, you can place items across grid lines creating a staggered effect that looks pretty rad. Grid-like, but it appears to align to diagonal...
Creating WebGL Effects with CurtainsJS
18.11.2020
This article focuses adding WebGL effects to <image> and <video> elements of an already “completed” web page. While there are a few helpful resources out there on this subject (like these two), I hope to help simplify this subject by distilling the process into a...
Upptime
18.11.2020
GitHub Actions are like free computers.
Well, there is pricing, but even free plans get 2,000 minutes a month. You write configuration files for what you want these computers to do. Those configuration files go into a repo, so typically they do things specific to that repo. I’m sure that...
Measuring Core Web Vitals with Sentry
17.11.2020
Chris made a few notes about Core Web Vitals the other day, explaining why measuring these performance metrics are so gosh darn important:
I still think the Google-devised Core Web Vitals are smart. When I first got into caring about performance, it was all: reduce requests! cache things! Make...
Copyediting with Semantic HTML
17.11.2020
Tracking changes is a quintessential copyediting feature for comparing versions of content. While we’re used to tracking changes in a word processing document, we actually have HTML elements capable of that. There are a lot of elements that we can use for this process. The main ones we’ll look...
Jetpack Backup
17.11.2020
It’s no secret that CSS-Tricks is a WordPress site. And as such, we like to keep things WordPress-y, like enabling the block editor and creating some custom blocks. We also rely on Jetpack for a number of things, which if you haven’t tried, is definitely worth your time as it’s...
A Complete Guide to CSS Gradients
17.11.2020
Like how you can use the background-color property in CSS to declare a solid color background, you can use the background-image property not only to declare image files as backgrounds but gradients as well. Using CSS gradients is better for control and performance than using an actual image (of...
CSS Background Patterns
17.11.2020
Nice little tool from Jim Raptis: CSS Background Patterns. A bunch of easy-to-customize and copy-and-paste backgrounds that use hard stop CSS gradients to make classy patterns. Not quite as flexible as SVG backgrounds, but just as lightweight.
Like this:
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Speaking of cool...
Logical layout enhancements with flow-relative shorthands
16.11.2020
Admission: I’ve never worked on a website that was in anything other than English. I have worked on websites that were translated by other teams, but I didn’t have much to do with it. I do, however, spend a lot of time thinking in terms of block-level and inline-level elements....
Mixing Colors in Pure CSS
16.11.2020
Red + Blue = Purple… right?
Is there some way to express that in CSS? Well, not easily. There is a proposal draft for a color-mix function and some degree of interest from Chrome, but it doesn’t seem right around the corner. It would be nice to have native CSS color mixing, as it would give...
Parsing Markdown into an Automated Table of Contents
13.11.2020
A table of contents is a list of links that allows you to quickly jump to specific sections of content on the same page. It benefits long-form content because it shows the user a handy overview of what content there is with a convenient way to get there.
This tutorial will show you how to parse...
SVGBOX
13.11.2020
I’ve been saying for years that a pretty good icon system is just dropping in icons with inline <svg> where you need them. This is simple to do, offers full design control, has (generally) good performance, and means you aren’t smurfing around with caching and browser support...
How to Work With WordPress Block Patterns
12.11.2020
Just a little post I wrote up over at The Events Calendar blog. The idea is that a set of blocks can be grouped together in WordPress, then registered in a register_block_pattern() function that makes the group available to use as a “block pattern” in any page or post.
Block patterns...
How Film School Helped Me Make Better User Experiences
12.11.2020
Recently, I finished a sixty-day sprint where I posted hand-coded zombie themed CSS animation every day. I learned a lot, but it also took me back to film school and reminded me of so many things I learned about storytelling, cinematography, and art.
Turns out that much of what I learned back then...
A Spreadsheet Importer You’ll Enjoy Using
12.11.2020
A great developer tool takes a painful task that would normally be a developer’s entire job, and makes it a pleasure to do. As a personal example, I’ve needed to build an image uploading experience many times in the past. I’ve hand-coded them and experienced far too much pain doing that. Then...
My WordPress Comments Wishlist
12.11.2020
A built-in commenting system is one of the reasons people reach for WordPress (and often stay there long-term). While I do think having a comment system is compelling (and as big of a fan of building on WordPress as I am), I find the comments system on WordPress quite crusty. It needs some love!...
Libraries for SVG Drawing Animations
11.11.2020
In 2013, Jake Archibald introduced this cool trick of animating an SVG path to look like it’s drawing itself. It’s 2020 now, and the trick is still popular. I’ve seen it on a lot of websites I’ve visited recently. I, too, feature an animated SVG loader on my website using one of the libraries I’ll...