Great story from Chris Zacharias about slipping a browser support banner into production on YouTube that probably did more to drive down usage of that browser than the collective public whining of web developers at conferences. Instead of outright dropping IE6 support, what if we … | Continue reading
I’m going to leave the title off this post and see what happens. Titles are a lot of pressure! I think there is a reason that the big text-based social networking sites (Mastodon, X, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc.) don’t have titles. Especially for short posts, the ti … | Continue reading
I friggin’ love Avatar: The Last Airbender, the classic three-season Nickelodeon cartoon. I watched it only by chance. I had found out one of my uncle’s was called on to create some of the prop stone weaponry for the M. Night live-action movie version. When I found that out, the … | Continue reading
It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean. So it’s been just about 2 years now. This was me and my wife’s thinking: After the sale, things seemed kinda fine for a bit, and that was encouraging. It was cool seeing new voices publishing new work I had nothing to do w … | Continue reading
I watched the Netflix Documentary American Nightmare. It feels like standard fare at this point, where we dip back a decade or two to some crime story that had a few twists and turns in it and make it freshly popcorn worthy again. This was the “is this the real life Gone Girl?” c … | Continue reading
I have the opportunity to play out at our friends Bar Rio here in Bend, Oregon somewhat regularly. I’ve got one gig in the bag already. It went OK, but I’ve got a lot to learn and improve about handling the live audio sound situation. Here’s that story so far. At this particular … | Continue reading
I’m still a Dropbox user, and a small feature I like on their mobile app is the Scan document option. You press the big blue + icon and it’s one of the options there. It opens the camera, you point it at a document and hold steady, and it takes a scan of the document. […] | Continue reading
Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System. I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of components over and over over (and over) for design systems. On a very profession … | Continue reading
Gerrymandering is a political technique where voting districts are drawn to advantage one group over another. In practice, it looks incredibly silly. There are geographical districts that make no sense whatsover, snaking through territory with no other purpose than to bring power … | Continue reading
My favorite TV show, Northern Exposure (1990-1995) was entirely unavailable on any streaming service since streaming services existed. If you wanted to watch it, you had to get your hands on the DVDs. I totally have them. The first two seasons came in a little cute parka around t … | Continue reading
New-to-me, a site from Philip Kiely: Who Pays Technical Writers. Shout out Paul Esch-Laurent for suggesting Boost and it getting added. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I don’t see robots being able to craft the kind of technical writing I like. It’s that kind that clearly comes … | Continue reading
It took Dave and me 12 years to get to 600 episodes of ShopTalk Show. For that episode, we asked you what the web would be like in another 12 years. | Continue reading
I just want to echo Josh’s sentiment: In a way, it’s hard to blame companies because they honestly want to know and, in the best-case scenario, actually use what they get to make things better. But it’s oh-so-overwhelming. Just constantly about every single little thing. One of m … | Continue reading
I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work first, showing there is interest, then pushing to get it standardized. But Coil […] | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett with a bit that resonates: There are all sorts of things that can end the career of a professional creators, including burnout, financial pressures, losing relevance and more. These are things I would like to avoid so I can keep writing and podcasting about the to … | Continue reading
This tweet went around: To which Jason Velazquez says: I have good news and bad news. The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere. […] the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery. There has been a real uptick in I … | Continue reading
A biting first sentence from Robin Berjon: No one can explain what you do. Let’s face it, you don’t do a great job explaining it either. The Chimeralogists I’ve always wanted to be good at answering this question. My default answer is “web design and development”, but I find 90% … | Continue reading
Maggie Appleton thinks there should be Speculative Calendar Events. I don’t want to add them as real events. Because they are not real events. They are speculative possibilities of events. The majority of them won’t be filled, and having both speculative and real events looking a … | Continue reading
I live in the Awbrey Butte neighborhood of Bend, Oregon. Say I was going to move to Butte, Montana. I could plug those into this app and get neighborhood comparisons. Much like Awbrey Butte in Bend with its hillside views and upscale homes, Butte’s Uptown also features prominent … | Continue reading
Robin: A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your sho … | Continue reading
Just finished Fractal Noise. There was a bunch of controversy about that cover, apparently, which I was only aware of now in Googling around about the book to find the image. I don’t know what to say about all that, but I can say that the cover is extremely distracting. The entir … | Continue reading
I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf theme that doesn’t have that. Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they even don’t want to. I somehow never considered si … | Continue reading
I originally blogged this on CodePen back in 2014 when I must have been feeling a little spicy. | Continue reading
Say you were getting into web design and development right now. What’s the best way to get going? Dave and I talked about that on the last ShopTalk Show. My best advice: give yourself some stakes. Build something that matters to you, at least a little bit. The classic is to make … | Continue reading
This is how my dumb brain works most of the time. You know how you’re supposed to drink a bunch of water, right? Three liters or something, more than most of us do. But you obviously don’t get credit for a Coke Zero. Or a Coors Light. Those aren’t water, that’s soda and beer. Wha … | Continue reading
I just learned about BeMyEyes from a Léonie Watson post she wrote last year: BeMyEyes is one of the most remarkable apps to have emerged in recent years. You sign up either as a sighted volunteer, or a blind or low vision person. If, like me, you fall into the latter category, yo … | Continue reading
I’m writing web development musings at Frontend Masters new publication Boost. Here are some recent ones that I’m proud of: Fine, I’ll Use a Super Basic CSS Processing Setup. In which I end up setting up Lightning CSS because even on fairly vanilla projects there is some CSS help … | Continue reading
Have you ever seen NFL RedZone? Here’s how they describe it: Scott Hanson kicks off your Sunday with 7 hours of live football, featuring up to 8 games at once within the octobox. NFL RedZone brings you every touchdown from every game, every Sunday afternoon during the regular sea … | Continue reading
My daughter’s kindergarten class has a “no chanting” rule. It was established on day one of the class. It was already known, from pre-K last year, that this group of kids just loves chanting. Even with the rule in place, they are prone to chanting. Re-cess! Re-cess! Re-cess! I wa … | Continue reading
If you’re learning about container queries (anywhere), the chances are high that you’re going to come across demos that use a “card” element. It’s probably going to have an image, a header, and a paragraph. The image will be on top when the card is pretty narrow, and on the side … | Continue reading
★★★★☆ The story of Wanderers by Chuck Wendig is immediately engaging. The first pages open with a girl walking out of her house and… not stopping. That’s immediately weird and doesn’t let up, scoping up the weirdness and the world’s reaction to it gradually over 800 pages. A kind … | Continue reading
That’s right, I’m pretty famous now because my favorite web browser published an article with some of my favorite tools. Lucky for us over here at Browser HQ, Chris found a moment to share 10 things he can’t live without as a developer which span from certified tech classics, lik … | Continue reading
Let’s say you have 100 people. They can break into groups of any size. Each group gets 100 toothpicks. The goal: build the tallest structure with the toothpicks. What is the optimal group size? Maybe it’s a group of 100. Everyone works together contributing their best ideas and p … | Continue reading
I’ve got high blood pressure. I’m sure it’s all the classics: overweight, not great diet, a little stress. My readings at the doctor’s always tend to be high, and they do this little dance where they write it off to normal variation or morning exercise or the minor stress of bein … | Continue reading
Cool things that I bookmarked throughout the year. Maybe this will spark some gift ideas for you. None of these are affiliate links or anything, not that I’m above that 🤔. Crokinole Crokinole is a wooden dexterity game that is a lot like curling. It doesn’t have the long … | Continue reading
Miranda and I plucked a movie out of a hat the other night. We had a babysitter already for some other plans that fell through, and we’re like eh might as well keep the sitter and go see a movie. We picked The Shift because the trailer looked kinda thriller intense fun, narrowly … | Continue reading
You know those One Time Password inputs? Typically 4 or 6 numbers, something like: Well I came across an article by Phuoc Nguyen about them called Build an OTP input field. I’d say all-in-all, Phuoc did a good job. The design and user experience was considered, like using the arr … | Continue reading
If you have an occasion to have or read kids books, you might have read the famous I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Or the great followups This Is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat. Really everything he does is good. My favorite is Triangle and there is a pretty laugh-out-loud-y [… … | Continue reading
My nephew was trying to decide to ask for a either a banjo or a mandolin this Christmas, so I made him this video to help decide. | Continue reading
I was thinking about :has() in CSS a little bit today — Firefox 121 is dropping in mid-December and then we’ll have support across the board for that beauty. I was like… doesn’t this make column highlighting easy once and for all? You can check if a table cell is :hover-ed, then … | Continue reading
All I do to make this work on this site is make a page template: Then publish a page at that URL using that template. | Continue reading
I’ve taken over the hosting of christopher.org, the main site of our dear departed friend Christopher Schmitt. It is home to seventeen years of blog posts and a good place to be reminded of all the other professional work he did, from books written, conferences spoken at, podcast … | Continue reading
(I did a Twitter thread on this a while back, against my better judgment, and now moving to a proper blog.) The hanging-punctuation property in CSS is almost a no-brainer. The classic example is a blockquote that starts with a curly-quote. Hanging that opening curly-quote into th … | Continue reading
Henrik Karlsson for the post A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. Full of choice quotes but here’s just one: The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not … | Continue reading
(Saw this on Matt C.’s blog and following suit.) 📨 Mail Client: Mimestream 📮 Mail Server: Google 📝 Notes: Professionally: Notion. Personal & Quick scratchpad = Bear. ✅ To-Do: Things 📷 Photo Shooting: Mostly: iPhone 14. When specifically out shootin … | Continue reading
I mentioned that the book Why Are You Out Of School? from my friends has a page in it about not being AI created. Here’s that: Reminds me of these “badges” I saw the other day. The intention looks the same: I like the sentiment. Here’s mine, which let’s say applies to every word … | Continue reading
Me adding a little banjo to my buddy Chris Jones cover of The Lumineer’s song Stubborn Love: | Continue reading