Getting Your `head` Straight: A New CSS Performance Diagnostics Snippet

There are plenty of ways to detect performance bottlenecks and audit CSS. We can look into common performance bottlenecks and the complexity of stylesheets, the way we load assets, and the order in which it happens. One helpful way to spot common problems easily is to use some sort of a performance diagnostics CSS — a dedicated stylesheet that highlights...

11h

How To Build Your Own Mouseless Development Environment

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Software development, there was a young developer, your humble servant, discovering Linux for the first time. Suddenly, I had access to the Linux shell, a tool offering many ways to automate everything I didn’t want to do again and again. But Ubuntu wasn’t without drawbacks. I was often the victim of display...

1d

How Web Development Tools Are Helping Users Keep Pace With Rapid Change

Several years ago, I wrote about website builders for a living. Yes, that’s a thing. Back then there seemed to be a gulf between drag-and-drop tools and full-blown web development. Today, it’s heartening to see the likes of Wix adding more code-heavy options to their repertoire. Judging by Velo by Wix’s report, I’m not alone in feeling that way. The...

1d

Are Imposter Domains Re-Publishing Your Website?

We think of web scraping as a tool used to harvest web content for information analysis purposes, sometimes to the detriment of the site owner. For example, someone might web scrape all the product pages of a competitor’s retail site to harvest information about products being offered and current pricing to try to gain a competitive edge. Web scraping...

2d

Monetize Open-Source Software With Gatsby Functions And Stripe

In this article, I’ll be explaining how I’ve used Gatsby Functions and the Stripe API to enable secure “Pay what you want” contributions that help fund my open-source project MDX Embed. Note: MDX Embed allows you to easily embed popular third-party media content such as YouTube videos, Tweets, Instagram posts, Egghead lessons, Spotify, TikTok and many...

5d

Web Quality Assurance: From User Requirements To Web Risk Management

As a chemist by trade, I received a Master's degree in Quality Management and Quality Control from Bordeaux University. My initial career was in the wine industry, ensuring the quality of the laboratory's operations and the analyses that came out of it. As a side note, the last question of my job interview as quality assurance manager of the laboratory...

6d

Reasons To Build A CRM-Powered Website For Your Business

Most businesses today rely on simple brochure websites for their online presence. These tend to be static websites with a few pages giving core information about the business and details on products and services offered. Although these are relatively cheap and less complicated to develop than a site that offers more advanced user experiences, a business...

6d

Reducing The Need For Pseudo-Elements

Per the W3C spec, “a pseudo-element represents an element not directly present in the document tree". They have been around since version 1 of the CSS specification, when ::first-letter and ::first-line were introduced. The popular ::before and ::after pseudo-elements were added in version 2 — these represent content that does not exist in the source...

1w

The Power Of Pen And Paper Sketching

Need to design something? It can be tempting to start with a computer-based tool, e.g. wireframing software like Balsamiq, or design tools like Photoshop or Figma. These have their place, but I would recommend stepping back and starting with the humble pen and paper. Sketching by hand can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable to those who don’t feel artistically...

2w

Orchestrating Complexity With Web Animations API

There’s no middle ground between simple transitions and complex animations. You’re either fine with what CSS Transitions and Animations provide or you suddenly need all the power you can get. Web Animations API gives you a lot of tools to work with animations. But you need to know how to handle them. This article will walk you through the main points...

2w