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Get Programmatic Control of your Builds with Netlify Build Plugins
27.5.2020
Today at Jamstack_Conf, Netlify announced Build Plugins. What it does is allow you to have particular hooks for events within your build, like when the build starts or ends. What’s nice about them is that they’re just a plain ‘ol JavaScript object, so you can insert some logic...
React Single File Components Are Here
13.5.2020
Shawn Wang is talking about RedwoodJS here:
… it is the first time React components are being expressed in a single file format with explicit conventions.
Which is the RedwoodJS idea of Cells. To me, it feels like a slightly cleaner version of how Apollo wants you to do it with useQuery....
How I Put the Scroll Percentage in the Browser Title Bar
12.5.2020
Some nice trickery from Knut Melvær.
Ultimately the trick boils down to figuring out how far you’ve scrolled on the page and changing the title to show it, like:
document.title = `${percent}% ${post.title}`
Knut’s trick assumes React and installing an additional library. I’m sure...
min(), max(), and clamp() are CSS magic!
12.5.2020
Nice video from Kevin Powell. Here are some notes, thoughts, and stuff I learned while watching it. Right when they came out, I was mostly obsessed with font-size usage, but they are just functions, so they can be used anywhere you’d use a number, like a length.
Sometimes pretty basic usage...
Chromium lands Flexbox gap
9.5.2020
I mentioned this the other day via Michelle Barker’s coverage, but here I’ll link to the official announcement. The main thing is that we’ll be getting gap with flexbox, which means:
.flex-parent {
display: flex;
gap: 1rem;
}
.flex-child {
flex: 1;
}
That’s excellent...
I’m getting back to making videos
8.5.2020
It’s probably one part coronavirus, one part new-fancy-video setup, and one part “hey this is good for CodePen too,” but I’ve been doing more videos lately. It’s nice to be back in the swing of that for a minute. There’s something fun about coming back to an...
No-Comma Color Functions in CSS
4.5.2020
There have been a couple of viral tweets about this lately, one from Adam Argyle and one from Mathias Bynes. This is a nice change that makes CSS a bit more clear. Before, every single color function actually needs two functions, one for transparency and one without, this eliminates that need...
CSS-Only Marquee Effect
5.4.2020
You make sure the text is more than twice the width of the screen, then use negative translate animations to do the marquee movement.
You’ll probably want to aria-hidden all but one of them if you need to duplicate the text. Or, you could use a very clever CSS trick...
RSS Stuff
31.3.2020
Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too:
Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content...
Add Beautiful Images with the Unsplash API
26.3.2020
Perhaps you know Unsplash? I'd wager it's the most popular stock photography site out there for two big reasons:
Every photo on there is pretty darn nice
Every photo is entirely free even for commercial use. You don't have to ask permission or even credit it (although that's appreciated).
Here's...
Make Yourself a Little API With Netlify Functions
10.3.2020
Here's an example of a nice little use case for cloud functions. Glitch has this great package of friendly words. Say you wanted to randomly generate "happy-elephant" or "walking-tree", and you need to do that on your website in JavaScript. Well, this package is pretty big (~200 KB), necessarily...
Chameleonic Header
26.2.2020
Nice demo from Sebastiano Guerriero. When a fixed-position header moves from overlapping differently-colored backgrounds, the colors flop out to be appropriate for that background. Sebastiano's technique is very clever, involving multiple copies of the header within each section (where the copies...
2020 Stack
13.2.2020
In an article with the most clickbaity article ever, Joe Honton does a nice job of talking about the evolving landscape of web development. "Full-stack" perhaps had its day as a useful term, but since front-end development touches so many parts of the stack now, it's not a particularly useful term....
Sticky Table of Contents with Scrolling Active States
30.1.2020
Say you have a two-column layout: a main column with content. Say it has a lot of content, with sections that requires scrolling. And let's toss in a sidebar column that is largely empty, such that you can safely put a position: sticky; table of contents over there for all that content in the main...
Min and Max Width/Height in CSS
24.1.2020
Here's a nice deep dive into min-width / min-height / max-width / max-height from Ahmad Shadeed. I like how Ahmad applies the properties to real-world design situations in addition to explaining how it works. In the very first demo, for example, he shows a button where min-width is used as a method...
How to Turn a Procreate Drawing into a Web Animation
20.1.2020
I recently started drawing on my iPad using the Procreate app with Apple Pencil. I’m enjoying the flexibility of drawing this way. What usually keeps me from painting at home are basic things, like setup, cleaning brushes, proper ventilation, and other factors not really tied to the painting...
Third-Party Components at Their Best
16.1.2020
I'm a fan of the componentization of the web. I think it's a very nice way to build a website at just about any scale (except, perhaps, the absolute most basic). There are no shortage of opinions about what makes a good component, but say we scope that to third-party for a moment. That...
NetNewsWire and Feedbin
16.1.2020
NetNewsWire is one of the classic RSS apps, debuting in 2002. I was pretty stoked when it went 5.0 and was open-sourced in August 2019! You can snag it right here. (Sorry, Mac only.)
It's super nice, is fast, and looks great. It has just the right features.
But... I thought, at least at first...
Water.css
11.1.2020
It's notable that Water.css was the #1 clicked thing from Louis Lazaris' Web Tools Weekly in 2019. It's from a 13-year old developer named Felix!
It's just a little bit of CSS you apply to class-free semantic HTML to give it nice basic responsive styles — the perfect kind of thing for a...
CSS-Only Carousel
10.1.2020
It's kind of amazing how far HTML and CSS will take you when building a carousel/slideshow.
Setting some boxes in a horizontal row with flexbox is easy.
Showing only one box at a time with overflow and making it swipable with -webkit-overflow-scrolling is easy.
You can make the "slides" line...