My family friends The Casey’s turned this idea into a book and song, which is available now at AmericanSongbooks.com: “Why are you out of school?” explains each American holiday, the significance, and historical figures we honor, and the REAL reason they are out of school! It’s a … | Continue reading
It’s been a bit over a year since I first downloaded the (Not Boring) Habits iOS app. I decided to make my habit “Sweat” and I would press The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox every day that I made myself sweat on purpose. Today happens to be the 300th time I pressed the button, … | Continue reading
Manuel Moreale had me for his interesting series. I just happened to saunter over to the coffeeshop so I’ll quote this bit. Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity? Nah, not really. What I do think is helpful is … | Continue reading
I tried out Beeper a few months back. The whole point is that it’s just one app that combines your inboxes from lots of other apps. For me, that would be: Messages, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, and a sprinkle of Singnal and Facebook Messager once in a while. I can’t remem … | Continue reading
I was working on a Pen recently when I accidentally clicked away… and the browser let me! Uhhhh, that’s not good — that’s lost work. We were using a handler like this to prevent this: It just… stopped working in Chrome 119. So, in case you do something similar, be warned! You nee … | Continue reading
As a lifetime Calvin & Hobbes fan, I couldn’t resist a new book written by Bill Watterson: The Mysteries. The Mysteries has absolutely nothing to do with Calvin & Hobbes, which is fine of course, I have such respect for Mr. Watterson that I’d be interested in anything he did. The … | Continue reading
I forgot to publish this chat I had with Tracy last month. I like this part of their summary page: Chris and Tracy emphasize the importance of starting a blog without overthinking it, pointing back to their early days of blogging about topics they were passionate about. They refl … | Continue reading
This is a little negative-nancy-ish, so if you aren’t feeling that right now — just close this tab 😜. It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, … | Continue reading
I know a guy who doesn’t like electronic instrument tuners. He just uses whatever device is in front of him, goes to YouTube, and plays “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica. The guitar is in a standard E-A-D-G-B-E tuning and the beginning of the song has lots of those open strings … | Continue reading
RenderATL (back in June) was a great time this year! (The website right now is understandably all about 2024 and I don’t see a way to link to the 2023 website other than this Vercel URL that comes up in search.) The official video of me there is up, but the video just follows me … | Continue reading
“Search Engine Optimization” Blech. I hate it. This is what SEO should be: And to be fair, that does work. That’s all I did at CSS-Tricks and was rewarded with decent traffic from Google for quite a long time. It was something like 75% of all traffic, so it was something I though … | Continue reading
Redwoods, right? Coastal redwoods are the big boys! Super big. But wait, don’t people also say sequoias as in Giant Sequoias? Super big. Wait are they the same thing? Yes right? No. My kid loves NATURE BOOM TIME, and we both learned that these are totally different kinds of trees … | Continue reading
A little while back, while noting that CSS is slated to solve the “auto-expanding “ thing, I also briefly explained my favorite current solution. Simon Willison had a look and did a much deeper explanation of it, if you’re into such things. There is a little bummer with the techn … | Continue reading
Here’s another compelling reason to blog. I’ve seen the artificial urgency of tweets & toots bleed over into emotional essays on public mailing lists. New participants join a list and immediately make entitled demands. Fearful bordering on paranoid assumptions are used to state a … | Continue reading
I’m a fan of the general advice of use subdomains, particularly for all those little projects we all cook up and want to put somewhere with a domain name we own and control. Subdomains instead of top-level domains, because: But are there reasons you shouldn’t use one? Of course. … | Continue reading
Geoff wonders about “modern” CSS: … but there’s got to be some way to refer to this specific moment in time where CSS has exploded with the richest set of features we’ve seen since… since… since… CSS3. I love that CSS specs are no longer versioned like that but we’re definitely … | Continue reading
We took a trip to Portland this past long weekend to hang with the inlaws. Portland is a complicated place and I’d hesitate to get into all that, but we had an awfully good time visiting. We stayed in the Nob Hill area, which is maybe the fanciest and least-weird of the areas? I … | Continue reading
I just saw Stefan Bohacek made a WordPress plugin for Mastodon embeds. As Dave noted, the for a Mastodon embed is very big, the resources aren’t cached across instances. With Stefan’s plugin, it brings the size way down, and I notice it’s not using an at all which will help. A … | Continue reading
(In honor of Dan’s zero-nuance takes.) What font-family should I use? Should I use a grid system? Set up grids anywhere you need them with CSS grid. It’s quick to learn and handles the vast majority of layout concerns. Do I need a design system? If you’re making components and us … | Continue reading
How do you animate an element as it leaves the DOM? You can’t, is the historical answer. As soon as an element is removed from the DOM, it immediately disappears, there is no animation opportunity. The trick is to animate it as if it is leaving, wait for the animation is finished … | Continue reading
I mentioned one of my votes for Interop 2024 (there aren’t really votes, just like, my favorites) is for attr() extended capabilities. The point is snagging the value of an HTML attribute in CSS, along with the type, so it can actually be used. If you could do that (reliably), yo … | Continue reading
Here, watch Brian Rinalda and I have a conversation about where the worlds of code and content collide. That’s what the online CodeWord conference was all about, which I thought was an excellent idea and something that is very up my alley. Let me know what your favorite of all th … | Continue reading
Scientists witnessed the first stages of a common accent developing in Antarctica among its ever-changing population of scientists who spend months together at research stations on the isolated continent. Scientists Witnessed The Birth Of A New Accent In Antarctica What does it … | Continue reading
Oh man, good for me. Look at me! I am listening to jazz. Here I am, just taking in the moment. Fully present. Just me and the music. Yup yup yup yup yup. Completely immersed. Thinking about nothing else. The rhythm. The musicality. The syncopation. Is that the right word? “Syncop … | Continue reading
I was reading Robin’s Design systems, color spaces, and CSS where he was coming to the understanding that one of the reasons that the OKLCH color model (the oklch() function in CSS) is awesome is because of the “predictable lightness values” and quotes from the Evil Martians post … | Continue reading
The idea of scoping styles has been desired for a long time. The idea is to write CSS without worrying it will apply to more than you want it to. You can solve this in a number of ways. A way to do it without changing any core technology is to use naming. If you […] | Continue reading
light-dark() Saw Bramus post about this. Apparently, this is just a first step on the way toward a more robust schemed-value() function that can handle more than just those two themes and more than just colors. Still useful! Without light-dark(), we need to use media queries and … | Continue reading
The story The Town With a Song in Its Heart in the New York Times (warning: probably paywalled, but I did try to use a “gift link”) is one of those articles that is made for me. It’s a story about some little town I’ve never heard of, beautiful and full of charm, that takes […] | Continue reading
A friend has a go-to question for a conversation starter, particularly among business colleagues: What’s a business you admire? He runs Frontend Masters and without blowing smoke, I’d put that on the list. They run a good ship over there. Let’s see what else. I’m a Kwik Trip guy … | Continue reading
Let’s say you were looking at a sunset with your eyeballs. You loved all the shades of orange that were happening. So orange! You took a photo with your modern digital camera. Later, you get the photo off your digital camera on your computer. You like post-processing your photos, … | Continue reading
Much to my surprise, I’m still using Arc as my daily driver browser. I really respect how big of a swing this is for that team. It’s honest-to-god browser UI/UX innovation, in a way that it feels like bigger established browsers could never would never. It’s just fun to watch the … | Continue reading
On this site, at the moment, I have a 🔀 random button in the header that takes you to a random blog post. The chances that the random blog post has links in it that are dead are way too high. As in, the URL no longer resolves, or goes somewhere entirely wrong now. Perfect … | Continue reading
You know the feature: you get an SMS message with a 6-digit code (OTP) on your iPhone, and you don’t even have to switch over to the Messages app, the 6-digit code appears right above the keyboard itself. Tap it and the code autofills where needed. It’s an amazing feature of a mo … | Continue reading
I posted about how convoluted all this was recently in The State of API-Powered Publishing to Social Media Networks. I don’t think it’s gotten much better, I just wanted to document exactly what I’m using right now so I can track if it gets better. Here’s where I’d like to be pos … | Continue reading
According to the timeline, the period to submit proposals for what Interop 2024 should do just ended, and now it’s in the refinement phase. Interop, remember, is short for “interoperability” between major browsers. They get together and agree on what web platform features should … | Continue reading
Length requirements, character requirements, uppercase, lowercase, yadda yadda. This is not just security theatre. It’s a waste of time, the math makes no sense and it leads people to create worse passwords, not better ones. Password stupidity is no longer viable I don’t know tha … | Continue reading
… we all claim to hate complexity, but it’s actually just complexity added by other people that we hate — our own bugbears are always exempted, and for things we understand we quickly become unable to even see there is a potential problem for other people. No one actually wants s … | Continue reading
I like the color picker at https://oklch.com/ — it’s well-done and handy. I use it fairly regularly, in part because most other “color pickers” don’t offer anything P3-anything, let alone the particular model varietal you might want in CSS, which is annoying. (I emailed Sip the o … | Continue reading
I worked for Wufoo when it was acquired by SurveyMonkey in April 2011. Twelve years ago. I think it’s fair to say it was largely abandoned. The Wufoo of today isn’t really any different than it was twelve years ago. It’s still pretty useful though. I still have quite a few active … | Continue reading
Casey Newton: … it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you re … | Continue reading
Just days before Andy revamped his (more) Modern CSS Reset, Dave and I were line-by-lining it on ShopTalk Show just for poopgiggles. Mouthblogging is fun and all, but so is Writemouthblogging, known colloquially as “blogging”. Allow me to do it again with my fingers. You gotta do … | Continue reading
Dave, on ShopTalk Show lately, has been in favor of reducing nuance when it comes to discussing and deciding on web stuff. Do this. No, don’t use that. Put this here. There is already so much it depends stuff, you can get lost. Can we get some answers around here, please? That’s … | Continue reading
I’ve been clicking the Next Post button on Kagi Small Web quite a bit. It’s like the StumbleUpon of yore (a “bar” across the top and randomized d websites below) except all the websites it brings you to are people’s personal blogs. It’s just a charming experience because you land … | Continue reading
It’s the first official Croqueta Day, I hear. My short time living in Miami left me a big fan. Some call them deep fried bechamel, I call them Ham Blasters. Every time I’d go to a restaurant that wanted to do their unique take on a croqueta, it was disappointing. I don’t want to … | Continue reading
I should have said “can” and “have”: | Continue reading
I’ll cut to the chase before I type too many more words: I came across it via an Amit Merchant blog post. Then followed the thread a little. It all started with a discussion, as these things tend to in this modern world. I think it’s a super weird name choice, but I’m sure if […] | Continue reading
I’m still using Ozempic. Back in February 2023, I was 270 lbs. By May, I was 248. It’s slowed down a little, but: 241. I’m still happy with the progress. That’s a decent amount of time to be slowly losing weight. I’d like to keep it going. There is a bit of a roadblock, though, [ … | Continue reading
When I was giving what little advice I have about WordPress Hosting, I gently said: ISN’T IT FRIGGIN CRAZY THAT NONE OF THEM WANT TO HELP YOU WITH DEPLOYMENT? I wasn’t entirely correct there, some hosts are helping. Even my beloved Local will happily push a local site to producti … | Continue reading