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Site Monetization with Coil (and Removing Ads for Supporters)
13.8.2019
I've tried a handful of websites based on "tip with micropayments" in the past. They come and go. That's fine. From a publisher perspective, it's low-commitment. I've never earned a ton, but it was typically enough to be worth it.
Now Bruce has me trying Coil. It's compelling to me for a couple...
In Search of a Stack That Monitors the Quality and Complexity of CSS
12.8.2019
Many developers write about how to maintain a CSS codebase, yet not a lot of them write about how they measure the quality of that codebase. Sure, we have excellent linters like StyleLint and CSSLint, but they only help at preventing mistakes at a micro level. Using a wrong color notation, adding...
Moving Text on a Curved Path
9.8.2019
There was a fun article in The New York Times the other day describing the fancy way Elizabeth Warren and her staff let people take a selfie with Warren. But... the pictures aren't actually selfies because they are taken by someone else. The article has his hilarious line of text that wiggles by...
Building a Full-Stack Serverless Application with Cloudflare Workers
9.8.2019
One of my favorite developments in software development has been the advent of serverless. As a developer who has a tendency to get bogged down in the details of deployment and DevOps, it's refreshing to be given a mode of building web applications that simply abstracts scaling and infrastructure...
Design Principles for Developers: Processes and CSS Tips for Better Web Design
8.8.2019
It is technically true that anyone can cook. But there’s a difference between actually knowing how to prepare a delicious meal and hoping for the best as you throw a few ingredients in a pot. Just like web development, you might know the ingredients—<span>, background-color, .heading-1—but...
Using Immer for React State Management
7.8.2019
We make use of state to keep track of application data. States change as users interact with an application. When this happens, we need to update the state that is displayed to the user, and we do this using React’s setState.
Since states are not meant to be updated directly (because React’s state...
Quick Gulp Cache Busting
7.8.2019
You should for sure be setting far-out cache headers on your assets like CSS and JavaScript (and images and fonts and whatever else). That tells the browser "hang on to this file basically forever." That way, when navigating from page to page on a site — or revisiting it, or refreshing...
Let’s Give Grunt Tasks the Marie Kondo Organization Treatment
6.8.2019
We live in an era of webpack and npm scripts. Good or bad, they took the lead for bundling and task running, along with bits of Rollup, JSPM and Gulp. But let's face it. Some of your older projects are still using good ol' Grunt. While it no longer glimmers as brightly, it does the job well...
SSCCE
6.8.2019
You know what a "reduced test case" is, right? We've talked about it here. I imagine the concept is useful in many walks of life, but in the world of front-end development, you can think of it like:
A reduced test case is a demo/example page you create which reproduces the problem you are having...
Using Your Domain with a Netlify-Hosted Site
6.8.2019
Netlify has their own docs for Custom Domains, so if you're looking for horse's mouth technical docs on this stuff, that should be treated as the source of truth. But I'd like to take a crack at it from a slightly different angle, where we look at where you are and what you wanna do, and the point...
Let Mavo Shine in Building Interactive Web Applications
6.8.2019
As you could guess from the title, this tutorial is dedicated to Mavo: a new, approachable way to create complex, reactive, persistent web applications just by writing HTML and CSS, without a single line of JavaScript and no server backend.
🐇 Follow the white rabbit!
Mavo is developed...
Can you nest @media and @support queries?
5.8.2019
Yes, you can, and it doesn't really matter in what order. A CSS preprocessor is not required. It works in regular CSS.
This works:
@supports(--a: b) {
@media (min-width: 1px) {
body {
background: red;
}
}
}
And so does this, the reverse nesting of the above:
@media (min-width:...
Branching Out from the Great Divide
2.8.2019
I like the term Front-End Developer. It's encapsulates the nature of your job if your concerns are:
Building UIs for web browsers
The spectrum of devices and platforms those web browsers run on
The people who use those web browsers and related assistive technology
The breadth of knowledge...
Using Netlify Forms and Netlify Functions to Build an Email Sign-Up Widget
2.8.2019
Building and maintaining your own website is a great idea. Not only do you own your platform, but you get to experiment with web technologies along the way. Recently, I dug into a concept called serverless functions, starting with my own website. I’d like to share the results and what I learned...
Making a Realistic Glass Effect with SVG
1.8.2019
I’m in love with SVG. Sure, the code can look dense and difficult at first, but you’ll see the beauty in the results when you get to know it. The bonus is that those results are in code, so it can be hooked up to a CMS. Your designers can rest easy knowing they don't have to reproduce an effect...
Fetching Data in React using React Async
1.8.2019
You’re probably used to fetching data in React using axios or fetch. The usual method of handling data fetching is to:
Make the API call.
Update state using the response if all goes as planned.
Or, in cases where errors are encountered, an error message is displayed to the user.
There will always...
Bringing CSS Grid to WordPress Layouts
31.7.2019
December 6th, 2018 was a special date for WordPress: it marked the release of version 5.0 of the software that, to this day, powers more than one-third of the web. In the past, people working on the platform pointed out that there has never been any special meaning to version numbers used...
How much specificity do @rules have, like @keyframes and @media?
31.7.2019
I got this question the other day. My first thought is: weird question! Specificity is about selectors, and at-rules are not selectors, so... irrelevant?
To prove that, we can use the same selector inside and outside of an at-rule and see if it seems to affect specificity.
body {
background:...
Creating Dynamic Routes in a Nuxt Application
30.7.2019
In this post, we’ll be using an ecommerce store demo I built and deployed to Netlify to show how we can make dynamic routes for incoming data. It’s a fairly common use-case: you get data from an API, and you either don’t know exactly what that data might be, there’s a lot of it, or it might change....
Run useEffect Only Once
30.7.2019
React has a built-in hook called useEffect. Hooks are used in function components. The Class component comparison to useEffect are the methods componentDidMount, componentDidUpdate, and componentWillUnmount.
useEffect will run when the component renders, which might be more times than you think....