We’ve just returned from our spring break trip this year. Sppprrinnnng breaaaaakkkk. We joined another of the same families from our fateful spring break trip last year, so Ruby our 5-year-old was joined by her buddies Monroe (5) and Zoey (4). Any other day, I would have felt ext … | Continue reading
I ran into this problem 11 years ago and blogged it. The problem is preserved in this video that shows a hilariously early version of CodePen and how some CSS transitions are firing early and causing the page load to look weird. That old blog post used jQuery and old CSS prefixes … | Continue reading
Nicholas C. Zakas talked about delegation in a newsletter a while back. I remember my first experience with delegating was making the choice to hire people in the early CSS-Tricks years. I wanted to do it because entirely because of time. There was just too much to do and if I co … | Continue reading
I enjoyed this podcast with Susan Rogers who’s new book This is What it Sounds Like digs into why we like the songs we like. Susan unpacks the seven dimensions of music and how they show up along a varying spectrum in every song. She explains how everyone has an individualized ta … | Continue reading
Just my own personal experience in three acts. Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few. I’m sorry I even dipped a toe. | Continue reading
I kinda like tmux. A terminal multiplexer. Hell yeah. What it does, anyway. Less so how it looks or works. 😬 Toss a little tmuxinator on there and now the config is a tolerable incantation of yaml. (Or, probably, some shell script that sets things up and then calls that c … | Continue reading
I got disenchanted with Pocket Casts last month after the incessant crashing in Car Play. And I figured, gosh, Apple Podcasts is still a super dominant app for listening to podcasts, maybe I should just switch to that. I’ve always been attracted to that idea of “running a stock m … | Continue reading
When it’s hot and sunny outside, I can do computers inside in the nice air conditioning. When it’s cold and wet outside, I can do computers inside with the lovely warm heat on. When I’m sad, I can do computers and find something to cheer me up. When I broke both my elbows, my wri … | Continue reading
They are just better than their non-logical counterparts. Because: So since they are better and support is green across the board, why aren’t they taking over all usage? I don’t know that I have any killer advice here. I know that my own brain has done OK in flipping modes and ma … | Continue reading
Features like: Demo: | Continue reading
I’ve been calling it sem-EYE-glue-tide in my head for the last 5 weeks, but I heard it on a recent podcast it’s pronounced more like it’s spelled: seh-MAH-glue-tide. Much smoother. Anyway: 258. Down from 270 the day I started Ozempic. A decent 2lb-per-week slide down. Feels susta … | Continue reading
I just noticed this morning my Apple Watch has a slick face where thinking with the knob makes the numbers on the clock face stretch wide and narrow, to rather extreme degrees: That’s the San Francisco font surely, which I recently discovered was a variable font as-installed on m … | Continue reading
The trick is essentially the same as the gradient text trick. Make the letters act as the mask, and set the background to a gradient. It’s just this time, the gradient will be solid alternating colors. The trick is the lh units. New! Line-height units! Cool! Just Chrome so far, s … | Continue reading
A little CSS helper app from Henri Parviainen. So you can quickly design up some beefy ass scrollbars like Tim Burners Lee probably intended. I prodded Henri to add the standardized scrollbar-color in addition to the more fancy -webkit- ones as well as use the custom properties. … | Continue reading
It’s lookin’ good kids. There’s one use case that I find very well suited for Copilot, which spares me tons of tedious work – unit testing. Yanis — Using Github Copilot for unit testing I’ve seen that in my own test writing. GitHub Copilot has surely seen so many unit tests it’s … | Continue reading
The best one URL, that is. That’s tricky. For ShopTalk Show, I could give you an Apple Podcasts link, that’s a pretty popular choice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shoptalk/id493890455 But not everybody uses Apple Podcasts. You’ve got your Pocket Casts people, your Overca … | Continue reading
There are two major plugins for nesting in PostCSS that I’m aware of: There is a lot to unpack here! I think many people think of PostCSS as a “future syntax CSS processor”, probably due to the ease of setup of using postcss-preset-env, a plugin that is essentially a big group of … | Continue reading
Here’s mine: It’s absolutely nothing compared to Ethan’s famous bukk.it, but it’s mine. I chucked this directory online just a month or so ago after I was doing some digital file management. I had a couple of huge boxes of cases full of burnt (burned?) CDs and DVDs. There was a b … | Continue reading
From Dave’s So you want to make a new JS framework: You need say it’s “fast” This requirement applies to nearly every tech product. You absolutely gotta tell people it’s fast, but, plot twist, these products often aren’t particularly clear about what that means. Picking on framew … | Continue reading
Good idea! It’s a clear need and offers a clear value proposition. Best of luck. You will have a little competition though: And I bet there are several more at this point, I haven’t updated my list of these in a few years. I came up in this industry working at companies solving “ … | Continue reading
Hidde de Vries’s Data-informed flex-grow for illustration purposes is a walk through some of the techniques he used to build his bookshelf backgrounds. There didn’t seem to be an isolated demo so I made one for myself: Forgive me the sin of using React. Just seemed like a quick w … | Continue reading
This seems new? https://podcast.adobe.com/ Looks like it’s a “labs” experiment (Project Shasta) growing up into a more full-blown product, a whole new vision for podcasting tools. I like it. It fits with an overall vision that Adobe supports the creative endeavors of people. I’ve … | Continue reading
Dan Q’s demo is pretty fun. You’ll see a white page in anything but Firefox. But in Firefox you’ll see a webpage-looking webpage only if you View Source you’ll see nothing at all. This is a classic CSS trick that relies on the fact that Firefox lets you apply CSS to a page by inc … | Continue reading
After (a lot?) of years using Pocket Casts, and thinking how cool it is that it’s fully open source now, I’ve moved off it. I love podcasts, but the only time I really have to listen to them is in the car (CarPlay), and my trips are usually 10-15 minutes (I’m a 1.5×-er). Pocket C … | Continue reading
A Christian Heilmann project called Dear Console…. There are 18 in there right now and they are all pretty neat. I’ll re-post one (submitted by Pankaj Parashar) I thought was very interesting as I’ve never heard of the main API being used: On this site: :sad-trombone: Aside from … | Continue reading
As a hot take, it’s blasphemy that Disney even made a “2” of The Fox and the Hound (in 2006, after the 1981 original). Let alone made it non-canon. (Are we supposed to believe that in the time gap in the original movie between Tod and Copper’s childhood and the ending with the wh … | Continue reading
Dave and I did a little podcast crossover and joined Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer over on the Igalia Chats show. They are nine-parts deep on this series so far talking about Web Ecosystem Health. It’s a fascinating topic so I’m glad they are making it a whole series rather than c … | Continue reading
Tina Roth Eisenberg the other day: I get way too much email. Reading newsletters in my inbox has never been the right context for me to actually enjoy content I am subscribing to. Looks like I am not the only one who is struggling with a workflow that makes sense for consuming ne … | Continue reading
That’s fake exasperation. Yes, they do! I’m just not terribly surprised. If someone were to put me in charge of MDN and finding a business model, I would have used advertising as part of it long ago. I think it can be done tastefully, non-invasively, and possibly even usefully. S … | Continue reading
These likely bear no semblance to Official Computer Science categorization, but these are the categories of logs in my head: I suspect a decent amount of computer work is tending to logs of one sort or another. I’m thinking about this because it’s come up at work a decent amount … | Continue reading
I was catching up on Matt’s latest State of Word the other day. I’m something of a career-long user and fan. WordPress has changed a heck of a lot over the past few years. One big change was the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg). I wasn’t maybe on the bleeding edge, but I was a pretty … | Continue reading
So that’s: Just a massive deal. Cute that it landed on Valentine’s Day. This flips a switch in my brain: I can totally use these in production… right now. I won’t even bother polyfilling. I’m quite proud that in Google’s announcement post (thanks Una!) that the demos are using Co … | Continue reading
Fun little blogging theme emerging this winter here. I like 🧠 galaxy-brain stuff the most. That is, ideas I haven’t seen floated anywhere else but make good sense. There is a bunch of stuff that we kinda just know we’re going to get this year, and while that stuff is aces … | Continue reading
See this typeface Academy Engraved LET? It’s usually the first typeface in my Font dropdowns in every single app. No shade, it’s just a very stylized typeface that isn’t really my style. I want to remove it from this dropdown. Maybe not even forever, just deactivate it. That’s wh … | Continue reading
Is this: It’s essentially a scoped lobotomized owl. Love it. The idea of putting spacing only between elements is great. Having to select and remove spacing from the last element, or intentionally not select the first element, is weird mental overhead that is nice to avoid. Not t … | Continue reading
Sometimes when I change software, I end up switching back. I get excited about the fresh vibes, like moving the living room couch, then find enough little annoyances or rough edges that the temptation to move back overwhelms. Email clients are notorious for that. I get tempted by … | Continue reading
You can’t have a white favicon, because, in a lot of situations, you won’t be able to see the dang thing at all. Here’s a default Chrome tab while macOS is in Light mode. You can’t have a black favicon, because, in a lot of situations, you won’t be able to see the dang thing […] | Continue reading
I’m just a general fan of Conway’s Game of Life, mostly for nostalgic reasons. It was one of the first things I ever coded (Turbo Pascal) that was super interesting to me. Probably partially because of the visual and interactive components. I remember working on it feverishly in … | Continue reading
I guess that’s what happens when you blog about something. After you hit publish you see and learn a bunch more about that thing that you wish you know before you hit publish. | Continue reading
Simon Willison: Tip for anyone who’s been put off building stuff with JS due to the terrifying array of build tools and packages and framework choices you have to make these days You don’t have to use any of that stuff! A few years ago I gave myself permission to ignore it all an … | Continue reading
All the big players in the browser-makin’ world have announced their 2023 Interop project, following in 2022’s footsteps. One of the best things they all could be doing? Absolutely. Without concerted efforts like this, we risk falling back into an era where we can’t count on web … | Continue reading
CSS: What is the value of font-size on the body? 1.2rem… right!? Kinda! That’s the “specified” value, and it’s just one of many kinds of values that we might talk about when working with CSS, the DOM, and rendering our site in a web browser. Karl Dubost got all into this recently … | Continue reading
I won this little guitar at an auction benefit thingy for the Boys & Girls Club of Bend a while back. The company is literally called Outdoor Guitar™ and it’s right here in Bend, Oregon. The Outdoor Guitar™ is available in carbon fiber polycarbonate (bright tone) and brown glass … | Continue reading
I was reading Eric Bailey’s recent piece Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm the other day. It’s excellent and you should go read it. The plot begins with Eric signing up for a site, meant to help him in a time of need, and the damn thing just spins: Since I make dig … | Continue reading
270. That’s as fat as I’ve been in a while. I’ve also got a back injury I’m working through. The weight isn’t helping. Nor is my weight helping me do things I want to do: long hikes, skiing, and bringing big play energy to my kid. This all breeds a gnarly kind of self-loathing th … | Continue reading
Data in the 2022 Web Almanac says that the 6 and 3-digit hex color formats (#XXXXXX and #XXX) combined account for 74% of all color declarations. That’s not surprising, or even really bad, but it’s a little unfortunate as these color formats are the most boring and least capable … | Continue reading
There is a dissonance I’ve heard brought up more than once. It goes something like this: Japan is this beautiful place, renowned for cleanliness, simplicity, and sparse, orderly design in physical spaces. But digital design out of Japan is cramped, cluttered, and garish. Why? Som … | Continue reading
I’d open up Adobe Illustrator and make something like this: I have absolutely no memory of writing this one in particular, but there are piles of it and remember some of them. I had no particular vision here, nor is there any deeper meaning. I was just trying to be funny and weir … | Continue reading