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Levels of Fix
20.7.2020
On the web, we have the opportunity to do work that fixes things for people. It’s fascinating to me how different the scope of those fixes can be.
Consider the media query prefers-reduced-motion. Eric wrote:
I think it’s also worth pointing out the true...
Creating a Gatsby Site with WordPress Data
20.7.2020
In my previous article last week, I mentioned creating a partially ported WordPress-Gatsby site. This article is a continuation with a step-by-step walkthrough under the hood.
Gatsby, a React-based framework for static sites, is attracting attention not only from JavaScript developers but also from...
How to Italicize Text
18.7.2020
HTML and CSS offer us the ability to italicize text. I’m talking about text like this. Let’s cover everything you’ll need to know.
What is italic text and why would you italicize text?
You italicize text most often to call attention to it. Literally to emphasize a word, so that someone reading...
CSS Painting Order
17.7.2020
Usually, when I see terms like “painting order” or “stacking context” my brain will start to shut off and my eyes will gloss over. Not that my brain doesn’t normally shut off more often than not, but that’s another topic for another time.
Martin Robinson over...
Develop, Preview, Test
17.7.2020
Guillermo:
I want to make the case that prioritizing end-to-end (E2E) testing for the critical parts of your app will reduce risk and give you the best return. Further, I’ll show how you can adopt this methodology in mere minutes.
His test is:
Spin up Puppeteer (Headless Chrome)...
On dependency
17.7.2020
Rob Weychert:
But I can’t host your site or even my own site. I didn’t build the CMS. Other people made the hardware and software I use to generate and optimize images. Other people made the fonts. Other people standardized the digital formats for those images and fonts. I didn’t write the HTML...
Backdrop Filter effect with CSS
16.7.2020
I love these little posts where some tricky-looking design is solved by a single line of CSS using a little-known property. In this case, the design is a frosted glass effect and the CSS property is backdrop-filter.
The approach? Easy peasy:
.container {
backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
}
The...
Lazy Loading Images in Svelte
16.7.2020
One easy way to improve the speed of a website is to only download images only when they’re needed, which would be when they enter the viewport. This “lazy loading” technique has been around a while and there are lots of great tutorials on how to implement it.
But even with all the resources...
Irregular-shaped Links with Subgrid
16.7.2020
Michelle Barker covers a situation where you need offset rectangles part of a clickable area. The tricky part is having just the rectangles be clickable. That rules out using some parent element and making the whole larger encompassing rectangle clickable, which is a common (but equally tricky)...
Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity
16.7.2020
This is a masterclass from Dave:
After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives.
You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land...
Making lil’ me
15.7.2020
Cassie Evans made a lovely illustration of herself and then used Greensock to add a flourish of animations to polish it off. Cassie wrote a series of posts about how she did it:
In this post we’ll cover how to get values from the mouse movement and plug them into an animation. This is...
Make Jamstack Slow? Challenge Accepted.
15.7.2020
“Jamstack is slowwwww.” That’s not something you hear often, right? Especially, when one of the main selling points of Jamstack is performance. But yeah, it’s true that even a Jamstack site can suffer hits to performance just like any other site. 
Don’t think that by choosing Jamstack you...
Netlify Does Cache Invalidation For You
15.7.2020
This is one of my favorite Netlify features. Say you’re working on a site and you change as asset like a CSS, JavaScript, or image file. Ya know, like do our job. On Netlify, you don’t have to think about how that’s going to play out with deployment, browsers, and cache. Netlify...
Three CSS Alternatives to JavaScript Navigation
14.7.2020
Hey quick! You’ve gotta create the navigation for the site and you start working on the mobile behavior. What pattern do you choose? If you’re like most folks, it’s probably the “hamburger” menu that, when clicked, uses a little JavaScript to expand a vertical list of navigation links.
But that’s...
Open Prioritization
14.7.2020
Like Kickstarter, but for Web Platform Features.
That’s about the quickest way to sum up Open Prioritization from Igalia. Igalia is an independent company that works on browsers. They literally commit to all the different open source browsers to implement (and fix) features that we all use....
Running spot instances effectively with Amazon EKS
14.7.2020
I know this is a little outside the normal scope of CSS-Tricks stuff, but I find the whole concept of spot instances fascinating. Here’s the gist from a very-non-expert (me). You can just buy and pay for web servers, for example, Amazon EC2. You can save a bunch of money if you buy them...
My Long Journey to a Decoupled WordPress Gatsby Site
13.7.2020
As a professional research biologist, my playground used to be science laboratories filled with microscopes, petri dishes, and biology tools. Curiosity leads many scientists on their journey to discoveries. Mine led me to web design. I used to try learning HTML on my lab desktop while centrifuging...
Introducing Headless WordPress with Gatsby Cloud (Live Preview, Incremental Builds, and more!)
13.7.2020
The Gatsby team shipped an update to its source plugin for WordPress, graduating it to a beta release. The new version brings a new set of features to Gatsby’s headless WordPress configuration, which brings together WPGraphQL and WPGatsby to power a Gatsby front-end that pulls in data from...
Lazy Loaded Prefill Embeds
13.7.2020
Lemme sum this up:
CodePen has Embedded Pens. Build a Pen on CodePen, embed it on any other site.
We also offer Prefill Embeds, which remove that first step. With Prefill Embeds, the Pen doesn’t need to exist on CodePen at all. You pass in the code and settings you want to appear in...
An Eleventy Starter with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js
10.7.2020
When I decided to try to base my current personal website on Eleventy, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel: I tested all the Eleventy starters built with Tailwind CSS that I could find in Starter Projects from the documentation.
Many of the starters seemed to integrate Tailwind CSS in...