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Currently Reading: Progressive Web Apps by Jason Grisby
3.5.2019
I’ve been reading Jason Grigsby’s new book on progressive web apps this past week and it’s exciting. Jason explains what PWAs are and how they work while while doing a bang-up job covering the business case for using them them, too. But perhaps you might be thinking that a PWA isn’t necessary...
Easily Turn Your Photos into Vectors with Photo Vectorizer
2.5.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Photo Vectorizer is a simple-to-use Photoshop action that can convert any photo into a vector. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can save tons of time and frustration by turning your photos into vectors. With super sharp results, these vectors are great for...
Netlify Functions for Sending Emails
23.4.2019
Let's say you're rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That's the whole point of JAMstack. It's not just static hosting. It's that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript...
Inclusively Hidden
19.4.2019
Scott O'Hara recently published "Inclusively Hidden," a nice walkthrough of the different ways to hide things on the web. Nothing is ever cut and dry when it comes to the web! What complicates this is that hidden begs the question: hidden for whom? Different answers to that have different...
How to Get a Progressive Web App into the Google Play Store
19.4.2019
PWA (Progressive Web Apps) have been with us for some time now. Yet, each time I try explaining it to clients, the same question pops up: "Will my users be able to install the app using app stores?" The answer has traditionally been no, but this changed with Chrome 72 which shipped a new feature...
The Power of Named Transitions in Vue
16.4.2019
Vue offers several ways to control how an element or component visually appears when inserted into the DOM. Examples can be fading in, sliding in, or other visual effects. Almost all of this functionality is based around a single component: the transition component.
A simple example of this is with...
The Best React Extension for VS Code
10.4.2019
When working with React, there's lots of code that gets repeated over and over....and over and over again. Eventually, you start to think, "there's got to be a better way". Don't w
Using a Mixin to Take the Math out of Responsive Font Sizes
9.4.2019
Responsive Font Size (RFS) is an engine that automatically calculates and updates the font-size property on elements based on the dimensions of the browser viewport.
If you’re thinking that sounds familiar, that’s because there is a slew of tools out there that offer various approaches for fluid...
Native Lazy Loading
9.4.2019
IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:
<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />
Addy Osmani says...
Community Coding For The Web
8.4.2019
Open source barriers
Right now, it's too hard to contribute to open source.
This leads to a few things that are bad:
People who have good ideas don't co
All About mailto: Links
22.3.2019
You can make a garden variety anchor link (<a>) open up a new email. Let's take a little journey into this feature. It's pretty easy to use, but as with anything web, there are lots of things to consider.
The basic functionality
<a href="mailto:someone@yoursite.com">Email...
It’s pretty cool how Netlify CMS works with any flat file site generator
21.3.2019
Little confession here: when I first saw Netlify CMS at a glance, I thought: cool, maybe I'll try that someday when I'm exploring CMSs for a new project. Then as I looked at it with fresh eyes: I can already use this! It's a true CMS in that it adds a content management UI on top of any static site...
The Whole Spreadsheets as Databases Thing is Pretty Cool
18.3.2019
A spreadsheet has always been a strong (if fairly literal) analogy for a database. A database has tables, which is like a single spreadsheet. Imagine a spreadsheet for tracking RSVPs for a wedding. Across the top, column titles like First Name, Last Name, Address, and Attending?. Those titles...
Little Things That Tickled My Brain from An Event Apart Seattle
14.3.2019
I had so much fun at An Event Apart Seattle! There is something nice about sitting back and basking in the messages from a variety of such super smart people.
I didn't take comprehensive notes of each talk, but I did jot down little moments that flickered my brain. I'll post them here! Blogging...
Why I Write CSS in JavaScript
5.3.2019
I'm never going to tell you that writing your CSS in CSS (or some syntactic preprocessor) is a bad idea. I think you can be perfectly productive and performant without any tooling at all. But, I also think writing CSS in JavaScript is a good idea for component-based styles in codebases that build...
Understanding Memoization In JavaScript
4.3.2019
As our applications grow and begin to carry out heavier computations, there comes an increasing need for speed ( ????️ ) and the optimization of processes becomes a necessity. When w
I Spun up a Scalable WordPress Server Environment with Trellis, and You Can, Too
28.2.2019
A few years back, my fledgling website design agency was starting to take shape; however, we had one problem: managing clients' web servers and code deployments. We were unable to build a streamlined process of provisioning servers and maintaining operating system security patches. We had...
What We Want from Grid
27.2.2019
We felt spoiled with CSS grid for a minute there. It arrived hot and fast in all the major browsers all at once. Now that we're seeing a lot more usage, we're seeing people want more from grid.
Michelle Barker lists hers wants (and I'll put my commentary after):
Styling row and column gaps. I've...
Look Ma, No Media Queries! Responsive Layouts Using CSS Grid
27.2.2019
Not only has CSS Grid reshaped the way we think and build layouts for the web, but it has also contributed to writing more resilient code, replacing "hacky" techniques we've used before, and in some cases, killing the need to rely on code for specific resolutions and viewports. What's so cool about...
The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Algorithms: Pig Latin
26.2.2019
“Pig Latin is a constructed language game in which words in English are altered, usually by adding a fabricated suffix or by moving the initial consonant or consonant cluster of a