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Playwright
24.1.2020
So Microsoft launches a Node-based browser automation project called Playwright. It allows you to spin up a headless version of a browser and control it. Go here! Click something! Take a screenshot! That kind of stuff. Particularly useful for testing.
It's just like Google's Puppeteer, only...
Searching the Jamstack
22.1.2020
Here's Raymon Camden on adding site search functionality to a site that is statically hosted. A classic trick! Just shoot 'em to Google and scope the results to your site:
<form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get"<input type="search" name="q"...
Getting Started with Front End Testing
20.1.2020
Amy Kapernick covers four types of testing that front-end devs could and should be doing:
Linting (There's ESLint for JavaScript and Stylelint or Prettier for CSS.)
Accessibility Testing (Amy recommends pa11y, and we've covered Axe.)
Visual Regression Testing (Amy recommends Backstop, and we've...
The Modern Lovers
20.1.2020
I love stuff like this.
The Modern Lovers, a rock band in the 70's, play a show in Boston, probably having some poster of their own for the show.
Mike Joyce is inspired by the music and combines his love of it with the design style of Swiss Modernism to create a new poster for it.
Pete Barr...
A Scandal in Bohemia
13.1.2020
I love that Paravel is so busy doing so much cool stuff they literally just forgot that they built this and are just now releasing it.
It's a Sherlock Holmes story, but designed to be more interesting and immersive (even audio!) than just words-on-a-screen.
Direct Link to Article —...
Why do we have different programming languages?
13.1.2020
"But why do I have to learn Python?" She wailed, "I like Scratch!"
"I know," I said, "But there are different programming languages for different sorts of tasks."
"That's stupid" she said
I can empathize with the little girl in Terence Eden's story. In high school, I got super into Turbo Pascal....
Things you can do with a browser in 2020
10.1.2020
I edit a good amount of technical articles about the web, and there is a tendency for authors to be super broad in their opening sentence, like "What we're able to do on the web has expanded greatly over the years."
I tend to remove stuff like that because it usually doesn't serve the article well...
How to Sell Anything for Bitcoin on Your Website
7.1.2020
Selling things for bitcoin online doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it shouldn’t be, given the decentralized nature and low fees of peer-to-peer electronic cash. For beginners and DIYers new to the world of creating an online bitcoin or crypto marketplace, this article seeks to provide...
The Top 50 Crypto Memes of All Time
7.1.2020
Memes are the fuel that powers the cryptoconomy. Exploitable image macros, shareable acronyms, and obscure in-jokes are the stuff that crypto is made of. To mark the dawn of a new decade, news.Bitcoin.com has endeavored to catalog the crypto memes that came to define the last one. These are the...
A CSS Tribute to SVG
31.12.2019
This demo from Jérémie Patonnier is incredible. Make sure to look at it in Firefox because some Chrome bug apparently prevents the entire thing from working.
The big idea is that the entire demo is one <rect> element. That's it. It is duplicated with <use> elements when needed,...
PHP Templating in Just PHP
26.12.2019
With stuff like template literals in JavaScript and templating languages, like JSX, I've gotten used to wanting to write my HTML templates in one nice chunk and sprinkling in variables wherever I need them.
I had a situation where I needed to do that in "raw" PHP the other day, so I'm just...
lite-youtube-embed
13.12.2019
A standard copy-and-paste YouTube embed lands on your page as an <iframe> which loads a big ol' pile of other stuff to play that video. But the UX of it is still essentially an image and a play button. Click the play button and the video plays. You can build essentially the same thing with...
The Thought Process Behind a Flexbox Layout
27.11.2019
I just need to put two boxes side-by-side and I hear flexbox is good at stuff like that.
Just adding display: flex; to the parent element lays out the children in a row.
Well, that's cool. I guess I could have floated them, but this is easier.
They should probably take up the full space they have...
serpstack
19.11.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Is it your job to keep an eye on your company's search engine placement? Or your clients? Or are you building a tool to do just that? Manually Googling stuff isn't going to scale particularly well there. Wouldn't it be nice if you could hit an API and it would return...
How We Perform Frontend Testing on StackPath’s Customer Portal
15.11.2019
Nice post from Thomas Ladd about how their front-end team does testing. The list feels like a nice place to be:
TypeScript - A language, but you're essentially getting various testing for free (passing the right arguments and types of variables)
Jest - Unit tests. JavaScript functions are doing...
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVII
12.11.2019
Chronicle posts are opportunities for me to round-up things that I haven't gotten a chance to post about yet, rounded up together. It's stuff like podcasts I've had the good fortune of being on, conferences I've been at or are going to be at, happenings at ShopTalk and CodePen, and more.
My talk...
When to Use SVG vs. When to Use Canvas
12.11.2019
SVG and canvas are both technologies that can draw stuff in web browsers, so they are worth comparing and understanding when one is more suitable than the other. Even a light understanding of them makes the choice of choosing one over the other pretty clear.
A little flat-color icon? That's...
The Landscape of Cross-Platform App Development
25.10.2019
I don't track this stuff very well, but I get it. If you want a native app for Android and iOS, it sure would be nice to only have to write it once rather than two very different languages. Roughly double your reach without doubling the work. More and more of these things are reaching into desktop...
Crypto and Real Estate Were Built for One Another
9.10.2019
Whether buying, selling or tokenizing real estate, the property market and blockchain are deeply intertwined. As the purchase of property has become possible with bitcoin, so has the wider potential of blockchain technology to transform the industry. The convergence of real estate...
Some Hands-On with the HTML Dialog Element
7.10.2019
This is me looking at the HTML <dialog> element for the first time. I've been aware of it for a while, but haven't taken it for a spin yet. It has some pretty cool and compelling features. I can't decide for you if you should use it in production on your sites, but I'd think it's starting...