Join Us For Smashing Meets Happy Holidays

If you are missing your festive meetups this year or just fancy seeing some friendly faces and learning some new things join us on December 17th for another Smashing Meets event. Tickets are only 10 USD (and free for our lovely Smashing Members). The fun starts at 9AM ET (Eastern Time) or 15:00 CET (Central European Time) on the 17th December. Ok....

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How To Migrate From WordPress To The Eleventy Static Site Generator

Eleventy is a static site generator. We’re going to delve into why you’d want to use a static site generator, get into the nitty-gritty of converting a simple WordPress site to Eleventy, and talk about the pros and cons of managing content this way. Let’s go! What Is A Static Site Generator? I started my web development career decades ago in the...

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CommonMark: A Formal Specification For Markdown

CommonMark is a rationalized version of Markdown syntax with a spec whose goal is to remove the ambiguities and inconsistency surrounding the original Markdown specification. It offers a standardized specification that defines the common syntax of the language along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this...

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Designing An Attractive And Usable Data Importer For Your App

If you’ve ever tried to import data into an app before, you know, as a user, how varied the experience can be. In some cases, the user is overwhelmed with instructions on how to use the importer. In others, there’s no direction at all. And while that might look nicer than an importer overrun with directions and links to documentation on how to use it,...

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Smashing Podcast Episode 30 With Chris Murphy: What Is Product Design?

In this episode, we’re talking about Product Design. What does it mean to be a product owner, and how can you learn the skills required? I spoke to expert Chris Murphy to find out. Show Notes Chris on Twitter The School Of Design Chris’ Notist profile with his presentations Weekly Update A Comparison Of async/await Versus then/catchwritten...

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Weaving Web Accessibility With Usability

By formally adopting web accessibility standards, you can provide access to people with visual impairments without involving them in the product development lifecycle, but does that mean the end product is usable? In this article, I’ll briefly discuss visual impairments, as well as the connection between web accessibility standards and usability principles....

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Dreaming Of A Magical December (2020 Wallpapers Edition)

2020 was a year that was anything but ordinary, and, well, the upcoming holiday season will be different from what we all are used to, too. To cater for a little bit of holiday cheer in these weird times, artists and designers from across the globe got their creative juices flowing and created festive and inspiring wallpapers for December. Following...

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Reactive Variables In GraphQL Apollo Client

In this article, we will look at how to set up reactive variables, how the GraphQL cache polices come into place in defining read and writes to the cache, and provide the ability for developers to add types that exist on the client-side alone so that we can structure queries for client-side variables same way we can for remote GraphQL data. After learning...

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Copy Docs: Make Your Microcopy Full And Consistent, And Maintain It

Remember all of the times you had to multiply your Figma or Sketch frames just so you can demonstrate single-word changes? Or having to mingle with the .json file in VS code whenever you needed to update that button text? What about irritating typos due to a lack of grammar checking plugins in most of the graphic editors? I’m afraid that calling copy...

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Playfulness In Code: Supercharge Your Learning By Having Fun

I’m often asked where the ideas come from. How do I know the things I do? Having ten years of experience in development helps, but what supercharged my learning was pushing myself to build the things that came into my head, however unusual. I developed an appetite for building things that aren’t ‘the norm.’ With that mindset, every idea becomes an opportunity...

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