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Avoid Heavy Babel Transformations by (Sometimes) Not Writing Modern JavaScript
20.5.2020
It’s hard to imagine writing production-ready JavaScript without a tool like Babel. It’s been an undisputed game-changer in making modern code accessible to a wide range of users. With this challenge largely out of the way, there’s not much holding us back from really leaning into...
Radio Buttons Are Like Selects; Checkboxes Are Like Multiple Selects
20.5.2020
I was reading Anna Kaley’s “Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists” post the other day. It’s a fairly straightforward comparison between different UI implementations of selecting options. There is lots of good advice there. Classics like that you should use radio buttons (single...
WordPress Block Transforms
20.5.2020
This has been the year of Gutenberg for us here at CSS-Tricks. In fact, that’s a goal we set at the end of last year. We’re much further along that I thought we’d be, authoring all new content in the block editor¹, enabling the block editor for all content now. That means when...
How to Build a Chrome Extension
19.5.2020
I made a Chrome extension this weekend because I found I was doing the same task over and over and wanted to automate it. Plus, I’m a nerd during a pandemic, so I spend my weird pent-up energy building things. I’ve made five Chrome extensions with that energy, yet I still find it hard...
Using BugHerd to Track Visual Feedback on Websites
19.5.2020
BugHerd is about collecting visual feedback for websites.
If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking at your own websites and you’re constantly critiquing them. I think that’s healthy. Nothing gets better if you look at your own work and consider it perfectly finished....
First Steps into a Possible CSS Masonry Layout
18.5.2020
It’s not at the level of demand as, say, container queries, but being able to make “masonry” layouts in CSS has been a big ask for CSS developers for a long time. Masonry being that kind of layout where unevenly-sized elements are layed out in ragged rows. Sorta like a typical...
Unprefixed `appearance `
18.5.2020
It’s interesting how third-parties are sometimes super involved in pushing browser things forward. One big story there was how Bloomberg hired Igalia to implement CSS grid across the browsers.
Here’s another story of Bocoup doing that, this time for the appearance property. The story...
Tackling Authentication With Vue Using RESTful APIs
18.5.2020
Authentication (logging in!) is a crucial part of many websites. Let’s look at how to go about it on a site using Vue, in the same way it can be done with any custom back end. Vue can’t actually do authentication all by itself, —we’ll need another service for that, so we’ll be using another service...
Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips
15.5.2020
As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network:
On Twitter, I made it a thread.
On Instagram, I made it a series of images.
On YouTube, I made it a video.
How...
How to Tame Line Height in CSS
15.5.2020
In CSS, line-height is probably one of the most misunderstood, yet commonly-used attributes. As designers and developers, when we think about line-height, we might think about the concept of leading from print design — a term, interestingly enough, that comes from literally putting pieces of lead...
Notion-Powered Websites
14.5.2020
I’m a big fan of Notion, as you likely know from previous coverage and recent video. It’s always interesting to see what other people do with Notion, and even how Notion uses Notion.
I’d say most usage of Notion is private and internal, but any page on Notion can be totally...
How to Make a Simple CMS With Cloudflare, GitHub Actions and Metalsmith
14.5.2020
Let’s build ourselves a CMS. But rather than build out a UI, we’re going to get that UI for free in the form of GitHub itself! We’ll be leveraging GitHub as the way to manage the content for our static site generator (it could be any static site generator). Here’s the gist of it: GitHub is going...
Equal Width Columns in CSS Grid are Kinda Weird
14.5.2020
Everything is flexible these days. If you write grid-template-columns: 200px 200px 200px;, sure, you’d have equal-width columns, but that’s a rare day. What you usually mean is three columns of equal fluid width.
We’ve got fractional units for that, like grid-template-columns:...
React Single File Components Are Here
13.5.2020
Shawn Wang is talking about RedwoodJS here:
… it is the first time React components are being expressed in a single file format with explicit conventions.
Which is the RedwoodJS idea of Cells. To me, it feels like a slightly cleaner version of how Apollo wants you to do it with useQuery....
Using CSS Masks to Create Jagged Edges
12.5.2020
I was working on a project that had this neat jagged edge along the bottom of a banner image.
Looking sharp… in more ways than one.
It’s something that made me think for a second and I learned something in the process! I thought I’d write up how I approached it so you can use it on your...
Recent Episodes of ShopTalk Show
12.5.2020
There is a super cool new Podcast block for WordPress Gutenberg you use Jetpack (released in 8.5). I wanted to try it out, so below you’ll see recent episodes from ShopTalk Show. I’d tell you all about the recent episodes, except then this blog post wouldn’t age very well, because...
Accepting Payments (including Recurring Payments) on WordPress.com
12.5.2020
I’m a fan of building websites with the least amount of technical debt and things you have to be responsible for as possible for what you wanna do. Sometimes you take on this debt on purpose because you have to, but when you don’t, please don’t ;).
Let’s say you need...
Dealing With Stale Props and States in React’s Functional Components
12.5.2020
There’s one aspect of JavaScript that always has me pulling my hair: closures. I work with React a lot, and the overlap there is that they can sometimes be the cause of stale props and state. We’ll get into exactly what that means, but the trouble is that the data we use to build our UI can...
CSS Animation Timelines: Building a Rube Goldberg Machine
12.5.2020
If you’re going to build a multi-step CSS animation or transition, you have a particular conundrum. The second step needs a delay that is equal to the duration of the first step. And the third step is equal to the duration of the first two steps, plus any delay in between. It gets more...
Turning a Fixed-Size Object into a Responsive Element
11.5.2020
I was in a situation recently where I wanted to show an iPhone on a website. I wanted users to be able to interact with an application demo on this “mock” phone, so it had to be rendered in CSS, not an image. I found a great library called marvelapp/devices.css. The library implemented the device...