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
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