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Getting the Most Out of Variable Fonts on Google Fonts
30.7.2020
I have spent the past several years working (alongside a bunch of super talented people) on a font family called Recursive Sans & Mono, and it just launched officially on Google Fonts!
Wanna try it out super fast? Here’s the embed code to use the full Recursive variable font family from Google...
style9: build-time CSS-in-JS
29.7.2020
In April of last year, Facebook revealed its big new redesign. An ambitious project, it was a rebuild of a large site with a massive amount of users. To accomplish this, they used several technologies they have created and open-sourced, such as React, GraphQL, Relay, and a new CSS-in-JS library...
A Bit on Web Component Libraries
29.7.2020
A run of Web Components news crossed my desk recently so I thought I’d group it up here.
To my mind, one of the best use cases for Web Components is pattern libraries. Instead of doing, say, <ul class="nav nav-tabs"> like you would do in Bootstrap or <div class="tabs"> like...
Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS.
28.7.2020
A friend of mine recently asked me to teach her to code. She was an absolute beginner, having no idea what coding really involves. I decided to start where I started: HTML and CSS. Using CodePen, we started forking Pens and altering them. Soon, a learning path started to unravel.
The aim of this...
The GitHub Profile Trick
28.7.2020
Monica Powell shared a really cool trick the other day:
The profile README is created by creating a new repository that’s the same name as your username. For example, my GitHub username is m0nica so I created a new repository with the name m0nica.
Now the README.md from that repo is essentially...
CSS Vocabulary
27.7.2020
This is a neat interactive page by Ville V. Vanninen to reference the names of things in the CSS syntax. I feel like the easy ones to remember are “selector,” “property,” and “value,” but even as a person who writes about CSS a lot, I forget some of the others....
Using Trello as a Super Simple CMS
27.7.2020
Sometimes our sites need a little sprinkling of content management. Not always. Not a lot. But a bit. The CMS market is thriving with affordable, approachable products, so we’re not short of options. Thankfully, it is a very different world to the one that used to force companies to splash out...
Bold on Hover… Without the Layout Shift
27.7.2020
When you change the font-weight of a font, the text will typically cause a bit of a layout shift. That’s because bold text is often larger and takes up more space. Sometimes that doesn’t matter, like a vertical stack of links where the wider/bolder text doesn’t push anything...
A Font-Like SVG Icon System for Vue
24.7.2020
Managing a custom collection of icons in a Vue app can be challenging at times. An icon font is easy to use, but for customization, you have to rely on third-party font generators, and merge conflicts can be painful to resolve since fonts are binary files.
Using SVG files instead can eliminate...
WordPress.com Growth Summit
23.7.2020
I’m speaking at The Official WordPress.com Growth Summit coming up in August. “Learn how to build and grow your site, from start to scale”, as they say. Lovely, thick, diverse set of speakers. It’s a little bit outside my normal spheres which makes...
Vue 3.0 has entered Release Candidate stage!
23.7.2020
Vue is in the process of a complete overhaul that rebuilds the popular JavaScript framework from the ground up. This has been going on the last couple of years and, at long last, the API and implementation of Vue 3 core are now stabilize. This is exciting for a number of reasons:
Vue 3 promises...
Position Vertical Scrollbars on Opposite Side with CSS
23.7.2020
Fair warning: I can’t say I recommend this in general because it breaks a very strong expectation of where scrollbars are, which are useful for a lots of folks, not to mention, a core accessibility feature for many.
But it is a fascinating CSS trick and the web is a big place with...
Pausing a GIF with details/summary
22.7.2020
Steve Faulkner has a clever idea here. You can show an (animated) GIF and overlay a pause/play button on top of it — which is really a <details>/<summary> element. When toggled, a (non-animated) JPG inside covers the GIF, effectively “pausing” it.
Adrian Roselli calls...
Reactive jQuery for Spaghetti-fied Legacy Codebases (or When You Can’t Have Nice Things)
22.7.2020
I can hear you crying out now: “Why on Earth would you want to use jQuery when there are much better tools available? Madness! What sort of maniac are you?” These are reasonable questions, and I’ll answer them with a little bit of context.
In my current job, I am responsible for the care...
What ya need there is a bit of templating
22.7.2020
I had a fella write in to me the other day. He had some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it just wasn’t behaving like he thought it ought to. The HTML had some placeholders in it and the JavaScript had some data in it, and the assumption was that the data would fill the placeholders.
To those...
How to Make a Monthly Calendar With Real Data
21.7.2020
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 and only requires...
marketstack: A Market Data API
21.7.2020
(This is a sponsored post.)
I like the apilayer company tagline: “Automate What Should Be Automated.” They have this thick suite of products that are all APIs with clear documentation. They all have usable free tiers to develop against and prove out an idea, and then paid plans if...
When do you use inline-block?
20.7.2020
The inline-block value for display is a classic! It’s not new and browser support is certainly not something you need to worry about. I’m sure many of us reach for it intuitively. But let’s put a point on it. What is it actually useful for? When do you pick it over other, perhaps...
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...