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2020 was not a good year for learning
10.12.2020
There, I said it.
What did I learn about building websites in 2020? A lot. But what I learned is not nearly as important as how I learned it. So instead, I want to share a couple of strategies I used to unblock learning in less-than-ideal times.
I spent almost a decade teaching design and, let...
npm ruin dev
9.12.2020
In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard.
Seeing as my personal brand could be summed up “so late to the game that the stadium has been demolished,”...
How to Create a Favicon That Changes Automatically
9.12.2020
I found this Free Favicon Maker the other day. It’s a nice tool to make a favicon (true to its name), but unlike other favicon generators, this one lets you create one from scratch starting with a character or an emoji. Naturally, I was curious to look at the code to see how it works and, while...
Very Extremely Practical CSS Art
9.12.2020
I’ve always enjoyed the CSS art people create, but I’ve never ventured into it much myself. I’m familiar with many of the tricks involved, but still find it surprising every time: the way people are able to make such fluid and beautiful images out of little boxes. I always end...
TypeScript & Relevance
8.12.2020
In our wide world of building for the web, we have every opportunity to talk about tools. We lunge to fill every gap we find in our projects with a definitive technological approach. Some of us are given “a seat at the table” feasting on even the most minuscule of technological debates. This...
Overlaying Video With Transparency While Wrangling Cross-Browser Support
8.12.2020
As websites are becoming more and more dynamic when it comes to design, there is sometimes a need to incorporate complex, animated elements. There are many ways to do that from CSS transitions to 3D rendering on canvas, and animated SVG. But it is often easier to use a <video> since they...
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data
8.12.2020
Spoiler alert: There is no support for it yet. But it is defined in the Media Queries Level 5 spec that includes other recent, but more familiar user preference features, like prefers-color-scheme and prefers-reduced-motion.
The Polypane blog goes into incredible depth on prefers-reduced-data...
The Power of Web Development Outside Tech
7.12.2020
In 2020, I learned about the power of web development for organizations and nonprofits outside of tech. I learned that you can leverage your skills to affect change and build long-lasting partnerships.
This year, I joined the Board of Directors of the League of Women Voters San Francisco (LWVSF)...
Late to Logical
7.12.2020
2020 brought another wave of logical property features to major browsers and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my investment into logical, rather than physical, web styling. I feel like I’ve learned a new way to speak about the box model that results in less written code with more global coverage.
p {
...
Styling Comment Threads
7.12.2020
Comment threads are one of those things that look really simple when executed right. When designing them yourself, you may find that they are rather deceptively simple. There is a lot that goes into designing nice and usable comment threads, and in this article, I will try my best to walk...
Web Performance Calendar
7.12.2020
The Web Performance Calendar just started up again this year. The first two posts so far are about, well, performance! First up, Rick Viscomi writes about the mythical “fast” web page:
How you approach measuring a web page’s performance can tell you whether it’s built for speed or whether it feels...
Cloudinary Fetch with Eleventy (Respecting Local Development)
4.12.2020
This is about a wildly specific combination of technologies — Eleventy, the static site generator, with pages with images on them that you ultimately want hosted by Cloudinary — but I just wanna document it as it sounds like a decent amount of people run into this situation.
The deal:
Cloudinary...
How to Get Sticky and Full-Bleed Elements to Play Well Together
4.12.2020
I had a unique requirement the other day: to build a layout with full-bleed elements while one element stays stuck to the top. This ended up being rather tricky to pull off so I’m documenting it here in case anyone needs to re-create this same effect. Part of the trickiness was dealing with logical...
Happier HTML5 form validation in Vue
3.12.2020
It’s kind of neat that we can do input:invalid {} in CSS to style an input when it’s in an invalid state. Yet, used exactly like that, the UX is pretty bad. Say you have <input type="text" required>. That’s immediately invalid before the user has done anything....
How to create a client-serverless Jamstack app using Netlify, Gatsby and Fauna
3.12.2020
The Jamstack is a modern web development architecture based on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup.
The key aspects of a Jamstack application are the following:
The entire app runs on a CDN (or ADN). CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and an ADN is an Application...
How to Animate a SVG with border-image
3.12.2020
Let’s take a look at how to combine the border-image property in CSS with animated SVGs that move around a border. In the process, we’ll cover how to hand-craft resizable, nine-slice animated SVGs that you can use not only re-create the effect, but to make it your own.
Here’s what we’re...
Minimal Takes on Faking Container Queries
2.12.2020
It’s sounding more and more likely that we’re actually going to get real container queries. Google is prototyping a syntax idea from David Baron and refined by Miriam Suzanne. Apparently, there has already been some prototyping done for a switch() syntax which is like container queries...
Amplify, Amplified
2.12.2020
First, quickly: AWS Amplify has a new Admin UI. Amplify always had a CLI that helps you build projects by setting up stuff like auth, storage, and APIs. That’s super useful, but now, you can do those things with the new Admin UI. And more, like model your data (!!), right from a local...
How to Make an Area Chart With CSS
2.12.2020
You might know a few ways to create charts with pure CSS. Some of them are covered here on CSS-Tricks, and many others can be found on CodePen, but I haven’t seen many examples of “area charts” (imagine a line chart with the bottom area filled in), particularly any in HTML and CSS alone. In this...
Painting With the Web
1.12.2020
Matthias Ott, comparing how painter Gerhard Richter paints (do stuff, step back, take a look) to what can be the website building process and what can wreck it:
[…] this reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material,...