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Doom Damage Flash on Scroll
26.8.2020
The video game Doom famously would flash the screen red when you were hit. Chris Johnson not only took that idea, but incorporated a bunch of the UI from Doom into this tounge-in-cheek JavaScript library called Doom Scroller. Get it? Like, doom scrolling, but like, Doom scrolling. It’s funny...
Comparing Data in Google and Netlify Analytics
25.8.2020
Jim Nielsen:
the datasets weren’t even close for me.
Google Analytics works by putting a client-side bit of JavaScript on your site. Netlify Analytics works by parsing server logs server-side. They are not exactly apples to apples, feature-wise. Google Analytics is, I think it’s fair...
Designing a JavaScript Plugin System
25.8.2020
WordPress has plugins. jQuery has plugins. Gatsby, Eleventy, and Vue do, too.
Plugins are a common feature of libraries and frameworks, and for a good reason: they allow developers to add functionality, in a safe, scalable way. This makes the core project more valuable, and it builds a community...
Where Does Logic Go on Jamstack Sites?
24.8.2020
Here’s something I had to get my head wrapped around when I started building Jamstack sites. There are these different stages your site goes through where you can put logic.
Let’s look at a special example so you can see what I mean. Say you’re making a website for a music venue. The most...
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...
Offering Options for mailto: and tel: Links
21.8.2020
I generally like mailto: links. But I feel like I can smell a mailto: link without even inspecting or clicking it, like some kind of incredibly useless superpower. I know that if I’ve got my default mail client set, clicking that link will do what I want it to do, and if I want, I...
A CSS-only, animated, wrapping underline
21.8.2020
Nicky Meuleman, inspired by Cassie Evans, details how they built the anchor link hover on their sites. When a link is hovered, another color underline kinda slides in with a gap between the two. Typical text-decoration doesn’t help here, so multiple backgrounds are used instead,...
Let’s Make a Vue-Powered Monthly Calendar
21.8.2020
Have you ever seen a calendar on a webpage and thought, how the heck did they did that? For something like that, it might be natural to reach for a plugin, or even an embedded Google Calendar, but it’s actually a lot more straightforward to make one than you might think. Especially when we use...
Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting
21.8.2020
leading-trim is a suggested new CSS property that lets us remove the extra spacing in every font so that we can more predictably style text. Ethan Wang has written about it — including how Microsoft has advocated for it — and that it’s now part of the Inline Layout Module Level 3 spec.
You’d use...
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...
To grid or not to grid
20.8.2020
Sarah Higley does accessibility work and finds that “tables and grids are over-represented in accessibility bugs.”
The drum has been banged a million times: don’t use a <table> for layout. But what goes around comes around. What’s the the #1 item in a list...
A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Building the Site
20.8.2020
In the last article, we learned what goes into planning for a community-driven site. We saw just how many considerations are needed to start accepting user submissions, using what I learned from my experience building Style Stage as an example.
Now that we’ve covered planning, let’s get to some...
Never Build a CSV Importer Again
20.8.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
CSV import as a process is broken. Messy customer data, edge cases, encoding formats, error messages, non-technical users: importing data into applications is a huge pain! Ingesting data has been long neglected as a software product experience, leading to customer...
Let’s Make Generative Art We Can Export to SVG and PNG
19.8.2020
Let’s say you’re a designer. Cool. You’ve been hired to do some design work for a conference. All kinds of stuff. Website. Printed schedules. Big posters for the rooms. Preroll slides. You name it.
So you come up with an aesthetic for it all — a design vibe that ties it...
Chapter 3: The Website
19.8.2020
Previously in web history…
Berners-Lee, motivated by his own curiosity, creates the World Wide Web at CERN. He releases its technologies to the public domain, which enables the development of several new browsers for every operating system. Mosaic proves to the most popular, and...
A Community-Driven Site with Eleventy: Preparing for Contributions
19.8.2020
I’ve recently found myself reaching for Eleventy (aka 11ty) above all other tools when I want to develop a website. It’s hard to beat a static site generator that provides advanced templating opportunities while otherwise getting out of your way and allowing you to just create.
One...
Can you get valid CSS property values from the browser?
19.8.2020
I had someone write in with this very legit question. Lea just blogged about how you can get valid CSS properties themselves from the browser. That’s like this.
CodePen Embed Fallback
That gives you, for example, the fact that cursor is a thing. But then how do you know what valid values...
Timer Bars in CSS with Custom Properties
18.8.2020
I was working on a thing the other day that needed a visible timer. There was UI precedent for this type of timer on the project. People didn’t want to see numbers ticking downward; it was more ideal to see a “bar” drain away from full to empty. I mention that because there...
Queue Jumping in Netlify
18.8.2020
Cutting to the chase: if you’re on a Business or Enterprise team on Netlify, you can click a build to make it run next in a queue. For example, if you have a really time-sensitive thing (e.g. a bug fix going to production), it can jump ahead of some random development branch building....
radEventListener: a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance
18.8.2020
React is popular, popular enough that it receives its fair share of criticism. Yet, this criticism of React isn’t completely unwarranted: React and ReactDOM total about 120 KiB of minified JavaScript, which definitely contributes to slow startup time. When client-side rendering in React is relied...