WordPress has this little bit of optional UI where a panel slides in when hitting the Publish button on a post. It’s like one of those “Are you sure you wanna delete this?” warnings designed to build in one last check before pushing content live. That’s been around for a long whi … | Continue reading
—George Martin, Sound Pictures (page 196) | Continue reading
This is really a note to myself because I frequently conflate the two terms. It’s possible to be assertive without being aggressive. But that might be unobvious if you’re privvy to the primary definition some dictionaries are doling out, e.g.: assertive (adj.): Confidently aggres … | Continue reading
There are certain times that you go through in life. Some of us make changes. Some of us never change. Some change in a very small, or miniscule, way, and some of us change in a dramatic way — may be fast, may be slow, may be fgradual. I think that’s just part of the […] | Continue reading
In the ✨future✨ we’ll tell of the days when AI conjured images of lewd farm activities. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on August 22, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
If the offense gets a ghost runner in extra innings, then the defense oughta get a ghost out. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on August 13, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Schalk Venter (Schalk) and Schalk Neethling (Other Schalk) were kind enough to invite me on their Mental Health in Tech podcast. Chatting about things that are often taboo or difficult to broach felt refreshing. I mean, how many other interviews begin with a “mental health checku … | Continue reading
The timing was just right for the whole family to be together at the top of the stairs to catch the sunset out the hallway window. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on August 11, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
I’ve never been much of a writer. I’ve never been much of a productive writer. All it takes is a quick trip through my blog archives to see the vast gaps of time between any two posts. The funny thing is that writing is sort of what I do. It’s where the vast majority of […] | Continue reading
I’m a stir the pre-stirred yogurt sort of stirrer. Stirring’s a craft and no one stirs how I stir. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on August 1, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
I got to sit down for a one-on-one chat with none other than Dave Rupert for a recent “Smashing Hour” brought to you by the fine folks over at Smashing Magazine. It’s loose, unscripted, unprompted, unadulterated conversation — my favorite kind! | Continue reading
(Re-published from the Smashing Magazine newsletter.) I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. It certainly snuck up on me. Somehow at some point in time, CSS got smart. Like really, really smart. The language for styling the web with a quirky cascade is evolving from a standard paintb … | Continue reading
Reminder: Grammarly makes suggestions rather than mandatory revisions. It’s programmed to focus on text segments rather than content in full context. It’s made to follow the rules rather than making you better at the craft; the nuance and eccentricities that make you, you. Use it … | Continue reading
One of those neighborhood libraries in someone’s front yard, but for vinyl records. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on July 2, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Saw this from Lea being passed around yesterday: A historical day for CSS 😀🎉 If you write any components used and/or styled by others, you know how huge this is! background: if(style(–variant: success), var(–green)); Even if you don’t, this will allow things like: … | Continue reading
You can file this one under “super-proud-but-shy-to-say-it” because I made a thing that I love but am absolutely the worst when it comes to talking about this stuff. I’d like you to meet The Basics. It’s an online course that teaches — you guessed it — the basic principles of fro … | Continue reading
Miriam Suzanne and James Stuckey Weber sat down to talk CSS Anchor Positioning, one of those things I’m certainly aware of by nature of what I do for a living but have not bothered to dedicate time to. Miriam’s been aware of the feature from the spec side of things, of course, bu … | Continue reading
What’s the “best” way to represent artificial intelligence in an icon? I only ask because the only examples I have seen in the wild are vastly different from one another, where some do better than others conveying what the heck AI is with or without an adjoining text label. And i … | Continue reading
Not that anyone is asking for it. | Continue reading
Maybe it’s me. Or maybe it’s that the spec is still being ironed out. We’ve already seen changes to the CSS Container Queries syntax since it was initially released as a draft, after all. But: All elements are style containers by default. That means we have to explicitly declare … | Continue reading
I hardly ever at the same desk two days in a row. Once I drop the kids off for school, I decide whether to exit the lot toward the left or right, then aim for a charming place with wifi. It’s not that my office is all that bad — I simply like variety. I […] | Continue reading
You know those times WordPress is all, “Hey, we’re running out of memory here… think you can increase it?” Here, maybe a screenshot will help. It’s an age-old problem with an age-old solution: update the upload_max_size deal-eo to some bigger value, say 128mb or whatever you need … | Continue reading
Scratch that — that was someone else’s wedding ring. Mine is still very much lost and will likely stay that way, so I’m considering a tattoo replacement. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on May 13, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
I’ve done my fair share of whining and grumbling over the current state of WordPress. I simply find it difficult to know the best approach for creating a custom block theme. Do we roll it from scratch? Do we base it off the default Twenty Twenty-Four theme? There’s no good exampl … | Continue reading
Eric sets the stage to discuss his incredible labor of work (and love) to make GitHub more inclusive and accessible: Before we discuss the particulars of these updates, I would like to call attention to the most important aspect of the work: direct participation of, and input fro … | Continue reading
I lost my wedding ring on Sunday and it turned up three days later, five miles from my house, and full circle back on my finger. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on May 8, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
CSS Meditation #8: .work + .life { border: 10px solid #000; } ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on May 8, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Getting straight to the code: It looks a little beastly but I love clever tricks like this. Here, Terrence defines a web font with an array of font files that operating systems use for local emoji support. It’s not totally unlike leveraging a system font, only we have to do more … | Continue reading
“AI has fundamentally changed user expectations.” Really? As in we all expect AI to scrape content that isn’t theirs, hallucinate over the results, and spit out a degraded version of it? Sure, OK. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on April 25, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
I took the moderator’s seat for a recent Smashing Meets discussion on design systems. Brad Frost, Dan Callahan, and Nathan Curtis sat in as panelists, which was a real dang treat for me because I rarely get the chance to talk shop with adults, unless you count my wife nodding alo … | Continue reading
I spotted this CSS used in a very popular WordPress theme: Those .specificity and .extra-specificity classes sure pop off the page, don’t they? I wonder what they do. Asking the author directly would be a good way to find out, but who wants facts when we can make wild assumptions … | Continue reading
Hot take: Stop development on EVERYTHING until the “1 second remaining” hint on downloads and installs actually means that 1 second is remaining. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on April 12, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
How do I know it’s 2024? One of my clients is a YouTuber. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on April 10, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Penelope Trunk on asking her son to practice writing papers before he begins college: My son said, “I don’t need to practice. I’ll do the triple AI approach: ask ChatGPT write the paper, tell ChatGPT to rewrite the paper to not sound like ChatGPT, and then use ChatGPT to check th … | Continue reading
Where I can enter my vote to go back to saying “the net” instead of “the web”? ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 29, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
This seems like something I should already know and can’t believe I’m only now running into a situation where I need to enter a dollar figure in Markdown after writing it all these years. Here’s the deal: Type a dollar sign before a number and Markdown formats the content like th … | Continue reading
Happy MLB Opening Day! It’s the best day of the year. ⚾️ ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 28, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Remember when the iPod got its first color screen? Those were cute times. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 27, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 25, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous | Continue reading
Let’s say you build a little WordPress plugin. The files are all in tact and you zip it up before heading into the WordPress admin to upload and install it to your site. But it never uploads. In fact, you get an ominous error message that tells you nothing but “Incompatible Archi … | Continue reading
DigitalOcean is re-hiring the position for CSS-Tricks lead editor, the job that they let me go from last year. I don’t have any points or quips to make about it. It’s just a job, right? Besides, that was just over a year ago and I’ve been able to move on to other things in that [ … | Continue reading
Finally, we're on the lookout for a CSS-Tricks Site Editor to help us bring this and other community resources to life. Is that you or someone you know? Pass along this job post to those who might be a fit. https://t.co/SDvNbAOdbo (4/4) — Paddy Srinivasan (@paddix) March 21, 2024 | Continue reading
You can’t read anything by Eric Bailey without taking away a big ol’ bag of gems. I personally have not heard buzz around the idea of embedding alt text in images along with the rest of the metadata that’s packed in them. At first glance I was like, UH-HUH! There’s been more than … | Continue reading
Skip to content Geoff Graham Blog TIL Notes One Liners CSS Meditation #7: Nobody is perf-ect. ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 12, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your Comment Name * Email * Website Save my name, email, and website in thi … | Continue reading
I decided I wanted a Guestbook on this little ol’ site of mine after seeing a bunch of folks sharing Manu’s excellent example. I wanna be like the cool kids, too! I’d probably follow them jumping off a virtual bridge, too. But really, I love the undercurrent of life going back in … | Continue reading
Jonathan Snook with a sentiment that’s all-too-often on my mind: In the web industry, I often shifted my topics of interest and as I talked about those new interests, I would gain a following within that new sphere. Over more than a decade, some people knew me as a designer, some … | Continue reading
A classic fork in the road here: reinvent the wheel, or don’t. It’s funny, but as Zeldman describes his experience working in a small agency as a possible source of his habit building from scratch, I recalled my own experience as a reason for leaning into existing solutions. Like … | Continue reading
Skip to content Geoff Graham Blog TIL Notes One Liners Me to counselor: “You handle toxic existential crash site cleanups, right?” ✏️ Handwritten by Geoff Graham on March 5, 2024 Post navigation 👈 Previous Next 👉 2 Comments Courtney Robertson # March 6, 2024 Is th … | Continue reading