I took some time this week to update my site to the newest version of Eleventy. Although v3.0.0 is still in alpha, I wanted to give it a try. This iteration of mxb.dev is already 7 years old, so some of its internal dependencies had become quite dusty. Thankfully with static site … | Continue reading
A lot of new CSS features have shipped in the last years, but actual usage is still low. While there are many different reasons for the slow adoption, I think one of the biggest barriers are our own brains. # New feature fatigue Right now, we’re in the middle of a real Renai-css- … | Continue reading
Haven't done one of these since 2020, but this feels like a good opportunity to get some writing in just before the new year. Let's see if I can still remember how to do this blogging thing. # Work We built a lot of interesting projects in 2023 with Codista, and we’ve had a very … | Continue reading
I have recently been made aware that the frequency of new content published on my site has gone down quite a bit. Ok fine, I trash-talked Manuel’s website on Mastodon and he correctly pointed out that while I wrote an impressive two (2) blogposts last year, he wrote around 90 (wh … | Continue reading
Spot-on analysis by Max: Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption. I really hope that this when smart folks start putting their skills towards making the ideas of the indie web more widely available: I think we’re … | Continue reading
Dear Reader, Since there’s a good chance that you -like me- are involved in web development and/or have a special interest in technology, I want you to play along and engage in a thought experiment for this post: Imagine you’re a regular user. Imagine you have never heard of git … | Continue reading
A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow. (Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.) adactio.com/links/1955 … | Continue reading
On web3, Wordle and the radical concept of building things for free. | Continue reading
With container queries now on the horizon - will we need media queries at all? | Continue reading
Container Queries are one of the most anticipated new features in CSS. I recently got a chance to play with them a bit and came up with this demo. | Continue reading
I built a tool to analyze incoming webmentions. This new side project generates monthly reports to see how and where my content is mentioned. | Continue reading
"Asset Pipeline" is a fancy way of describing a process that compiles CSS, Javascript or other things you want to transform from a bunch of sources to a production-ready output file. While some static site generators have a standardized way of handling assets, Eleventy does not. … | Continue reading
I took a stab at building a plugin for Eleventy that lets me highlight selected pieces of text and provide users with an easy way to share them. This feature was first made popular by Medium, where authors can pick a “top highlight” in a post and hovering it will show a tooltip w … | Continue reading
I'm running a speed test on the new Space Jam site: the 1996 version on dial-up VS. the 2021 version on a 3G connection. Who will win? | Continue reading
Static Site Generators are all-or-nothing. Each time they build a new version of the site, they throw away everything that was created before and start from scratch. That’s usually what you want to ensure everything is up-to-date. But there are special cases when keeping parts of … | Continue reading
I don't think I have to tell anyone why this year sucked, what with the pandemic and all. 2020 is going down in history as a massive crapstorm. Still, I want to continue the tradition of “end-of-the-year” blogposts and since there’s already enough doom out there these days, I’m t … | Continue reading
The web needs to take itself less seriously. It's barely out of its twenties and suddenly it's all like "I can't make fansites for hippos anymore, I have businesses to run". It used to be cooler. It used to be weirder. As Sarah Drasner puts it in “In Defense of a Fussy Website”: … | Continue reading
Are we ready to revisit some of the ideas of the early web again? There are trends that suggest we might just have come full circle - and I like it. | Continue reading
Violence and injustice are omnipresent these days. We’re faced with an ugly truth and it’s gut-wrenching to watch. Through my developer-centric filter bubble, I sometimes see the tech world react to times of crisis. Often our first instinct seems to be to turn to technology. Buil … | Continue reading
Let users customize your website with their favorite color scheme! Your site has a dark mode? That's cute. Mine has ten different themes now, and they're all named after Mario Kart race tracks. | Continue reading
A free template to generate semantic, accessible & resilient résumés for the web and print. | Continue reading
In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But exisiting (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic. | Continue reading
Long before I wrote my first line of code, all I wanted to do was make music. I went to a music-focused high school, played in a couple of bands, and I loved it. I also loved making flyers, posters and CD artwork for local bands - It’s actually what got me started in design and u … | Continue reading
As the final hours of 2019 are winding down, I want to take a moment and look back at everything that happened this year - because it was a busy one. # Work At the beginning of 2019, I became a partner at Codista, the software studio where I’ve been working for some time now. Tho … | Continue reading
It has been three days now since I stood on stage at Urania Vienna, hearing Manuel close our very first conference. I'm still not really sure how we pulled that off. Photo by Sergey Poliakov (Twitter) I have been to quite a few web development conferences as an attendee, and … | Continue reading
There's a small town that needs a new road. The old road is pretty worn and full of potholes, so it's time for a change. | Continue reading
A pain point of the IndieWeb is that it's sometimes not as convenient to share content as it is on the common social media platforms. Let's improve that. | Continue reading
There is a thing that happens to me while writing. I start with a fresh idea, excited to shape it into words. But as time passes, I lose confidence. The original concept starts to look shallow or irrelevant, and the phrases sound awkward and repetitive. It just doesn’t feel good … | Continue reading
CSS can be difficult to grasp if you think about it in terms of a "traditional" programming language. There is a certain mindset involved that helps to understand why it works the way it does. | Continue reading
After Tatiana Mac proposed to bring webrings back, I hacked something new together over the weekend: A starter kit for hosting your own webring! | Continue reading
In last week's post, I talked about syndicating content from a static site to Twitter. But getting content out is only half the challenge. The real value of social media (apart from the massive ad revenue and dystopian data mining) is in the reactions we get from other people. Th … | Continue reading
One of the core principles of the IndieWeb is that people should own their own content. Controlling how and where they publish makes users more independent from big content silos. However, the main reason why people publish on Twitter / Medium or other platforms is that they can … | Continue reading
As Hurricane Florence makes its way across the US southeast coast, many people are stuck in areas with severe flooding. These people rely on outside information, yet have limited bandwidth and power. To help them, news platforms like CNN and NPR provide text-only versions of thei … | Continue reading
Over the last decade, we have learned to embrace the uncertainty of developing for the web. We don’t design sites for specific screen dimensions anymore, we make them responsive. We don’t assume ideal browsers and devices, we use progressive enhancement. When it comes to connecti … | Continue reading
If you’ve been to any web design talk in the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen this famous tweet by Jon Gold: which one of the two possible websites are you currently designing? pic.twitter.com/ZD0uRGTqqm— Jon Gold (@jongold) 2. Februar 2016 It mocks the fact that a lot … | Continue reading
The React JSX Syntax offers a layer of abstraction that's very useful for component-based systems - but it's easy to forget that everything you write ultimately compiles down to HTML. Encapsulating pieces of UI this way makes it easier to compose larger systems, but it also hides … | Continue reading
Good News! CSS Grid has been out for some time now, and browser support is very good. If you're building stuff on the web, this is definitely a tool you should have on your belt. Not only is grid worth checking out, it’s also ready to be used in production, today. You know - on t … | Continue reading
This article was originally published on CSS-Tricks.com. Designing loading states on the web is often overlooked or dismissed as an afterthought. Performance is not only a developer's responsibility - building an experience that works with slow connections can be a design challen … | Continue reading
Forms on the web don't usually play nice with bad connections. If you try to submit a form while offline, you'll most likely just lose your input. Here's how we might fix that. TL;DR: Here’s the CodePen Demo of this post. With the introduction of Service Workers, developers are n … | Continue reading
A truly responsive website should adapt to all kinds of situations. Besides different viewport sizes, there are other factors to consider. A change in connectivity is one of them. Earlier this week, I was sitting in a train on my way to speak at a local meetup. InterCity trains i … | Continue reading
A Progressive Web App, or PWA, uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience. Any website can be a PWA - here's how to do it. The "add to homescreen" prompt in a PWA Turning a basic website into a PWA is not that hard and has a lot of real benefits, so … | Continue reading
I built this product slider as part of a wine shop I was working on in 2015, and since it's also featured in a case study here on my site, I had a couple of people asking me how the animation was done. Well, it’s really quite simple – so here’s a quick rundown on how to make the … | Continue reading
I recently worked on a larger new web app. The product was in its early stages, so one of the first big tasks was to come up with a prototype for the UI design. I started doing some pen-and-paper mockups and some concepts in Sketch, but the project details weren’t clearly defined … | Continue reading
I've been a freelance web developer for about seven years now. I started making websites when I was still in school - I used to do fun little sites for local bands, events and other things. At some point I decided to do it professionally, registered my business and had my first r … | Continue reading
Two weeks into 2017, I used some spare time to relaunch my website. I do this almost every year - not (only) because of my neverending quest to optimize the shit out of it, but because it’s a great way for me to try new things I want to learn on a “real life” project. Altough it’ … | Continue reading
I recently came across the H5BP’s Frontend Developer Interview Questions. It’s a collection of questions related to building websites, meant for employers to vet potential candidates for a job. Although I’m currently not looking for a (regular) job, I thought it would be interest … | Continue reading
I’m a big fan of good looking band art. Sadly though, unlike other countries, Austria doesn’t really have a culture of well designed concert posters - they’re usually just bold type on bright neon paper stapled to a signpost. So for a long time, collecting and designing covers an … | Continue reading
I don't like to work in silence. Especially when I'm doing something that needs concentration, I keep my best focus with the right background music. There’s different types of sound for different tasks - for example, I like to do creative work with calm, relaxed acoustic stuff. … | Continue reading