Search
Converting and Optimizing Images From the Command Line
21.12.2020
Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, at least...
“I Don’t Know”
21.12.2020
I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say.
Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before...
The Advantages of Joining the Mining City Community
21.12.2020
This article explains the characteristics of the network marketing community based on Mining City and answers one not so simple question – why do most people fail in Multi-Level Marketing? What Google Won’t Tell You About Mining City Network marketing – also known as Multi-Level...
Bitcoin’s Early Days: Reporter Recalls $200K Sushi Dinner After Spending 10 BTC, Former Bitcoin Dev Sells 55,000 BTC for Under $30 a Coin
19.12.2020
As bitcoin touched an all-time price high this week, the tech reporter at the New York Times, Kashmir Hill, recalled how she spent 10 BTC ($224k) for a sushi dinner for a couple of dozen strangers. Hill wrote about the dining experience in a recent article called “How I Blew My Bitcoin...
Change vs. Inertia
18.12.2020
Recently, I’ve become more deeply aware of the inherent tension between change and inertia, as it applies to the evolution and use of web technologies. These forces have always been present and opposed to each other, but it seems to me that the side effects of these collisions are impacting...
Optimizing Image Depth
18.12.2020
Something I learned (or, I guess, re-learned) this year is how important it is to pay close attention to the bit depth of images. Way back in the day, we used to obsessively choose between 2-, 4-, or 8-bit color depth on our GIFs, because when lots of users were using dialup modems to surf the...
What Makes CSS Hard To Master
18.12.2020
Tim Severien:
I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard.
Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words):
You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the whole...
What’s Old is New
18.12.2020
This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain...
I learned to love the Same-Origin Policy
17.12.2020
I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience.
This wasn’t my first...
25 Years of JavaScript & 25 Free Courses
17.12.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
Pluralsight is giving away 25 courses on JavaScript for free to celebrate JavaScript’s 25th birthday. It’s no cheapie, either. The courses range from getting your hands dirty with JavaScript for the first time, to full-on reactive development....
Three Ways to Distinguish a Site From the Norm
16.12.2020
In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm:
Stunning visuals that cannot be created in UI vector editors, like Figma and Sketch
Beautifully-animated interactions that cannot be dreamt in the language...
Learning to Simplify
16.12.2020
When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification.
This year, I’ve learned that...
Slow Movement
16.12.2020
There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything...
How to Use the Locomotive Scroll for all Kinds of Scrolling Effects
16.12.2020
I was recently looking for a way to perform scrolling effects on a project and I stumbled on the Locomotive Scroll library. It lets you perform a variety of scrolling effects, like parallax and triggering/controlling animations at scroll points.
You might also call it a “smooth scrolling” library...
The Power of Lampshading
16.12.2020
I enjoyed this blog post from Shawn. Lampshading is apparently the idea of a TV show calling attention to some weakness (like an implausible plot point) so that the show can move on. By calling it out, it avoids criticism by demonstrating the self-awareness. For developers, Shawn notes, it’s...
It’s Always Year Zero
16.12.2020
In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law:
Everything just before me was completely broken.
Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary.
Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things.
We tend to judge things based...
Old is Solid; New Gets Talked About
15.12.2020
When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can....
What’s New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name
15.12.2020
WCAG 2.1 Recommendations rolled out in 2018. It’s been a couple years now and there are some new Success Criterion. In this article, I will discuss Label in Name, which is how we visually label components. We’ll take a look at what some failure states look like, how to fix them, and examples of...
Hell Yes! CSS!
15.12.2020
Speaking of cool CSS stuff you can buy, Julia Evans’ zine Hell Yes! CSS! is hot off the presses. A “zine” being 28 pages of “short, informative, and fun comics which will quickly teach you something useful.” Some parts of it are like cheat sheets. Some parts of it...
Representation Matters
15.12.2020
This year I had the pleasure of re-launching The Accessibility Project. I spend a lot of time researching and writing about accessibility and inclusive design, so this felt like the cumulation of a lot of that effort. The site now uses all sorts of cool web features like CSS Grid, @supports,...