11ty Linkrolls How to build an old-fashioned linkroll for the 11ty static site generator. One of the things I've always loved about blogs were the linkrolls... that candy trail to more and more interesting things scattered around the web. I love to see folks sharing the interesting things they find.…

Robb Knight posts 2024-01-16 A conversation in the Eleventy Discord led me to remember about the dependents page of a GitHub repository. That is, a list of other repositories that are depending on a p

This is clearly the result of living in a capitalist society. In recent years, people have felt the pressure to monetise their hobbies, so there’s a constant state of hustle. We all need money to exist in our society. In the online communities and circles where I try to hang out, there is a slight…

8 Mar 2024 Tomorrow marks the first week after migrating all the websites I share with my wife Silvia, from Netlify to Mythic Beasts. Very happy about the quick transition, and grateful to Leon Paternoster for the brilliant suggestion. Here's something I've noticed since. In a similar fashion to how…

I made some lightweight design changes to my site, keeping things simple but moving the date up above post headers, surfacing tags below and restoring Read more links. As part of this I dropped my dedicated Tags page and built a collection to surface my most used tags, sorted in descending order…

CSS Button Styles You Might Not Know Sunday 10 Mar 2024 Buttons are everywhere! We can use all sorts of fancy CSS to style a button. I prefer using Flexbox layout for example. In this blog post I shar

Hi All! 🤗 Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user…

I follow and subscribe to a whole bunch of blogs and less and less high-volume news via RSS. It's one of my absolute favorite mediums for keeping up with and reading content on the web. It's distributed, open and decentralized and remains one of those under-appreciated layers that stitches content…

March 10, 2024 Using an Eleventy event to optimize component JavaScript #development #eleventy #javascript My site leverages a number of web component for functionality on my site. Namely: mastodon post embeds, search, my now playing component, my theme toggle, post sharing and YouTube embeds. It's…

11 March 2024 My dad was a pharmacist. Whenever I was ill, he’d tell me to take paracetamol. So I did. And it made me feel better. But paracetamol doesn’t actually make you better. It only makes you feel better. It treats the symptoms, not the cause. For example, let’s say you have a headache…

There’s a lot of chatter around the new(ish) :has() pseudo-class. It’s something we’ve been crying out for, for years: being able to select parent elements! A useful mental model for :has() is that yo

Updated: 18 Sept 2023 We help Shopify merchants improve their web performance and see three common problems related to layout position: Lazy loading images above the fold Asynchronous loading of CSS needed for elements above the fold Not prioritizing the fetch of the the Largest Contentful Paint…

Adding Search to an Eleventy Site Without Client-side JavaScript October 9th, 2023 UPDATE: With version 3 of Eleventy out, the official serverless plugin has been dropped. I've written a new post with information on how I'm rolling my own code now. Earlier this year (2023) I added a search feature…

August 9, 2023 ; Does what it says on the tin. Uses and with a bit of ARIA to create an accordion that works without JavaScript while working better with JavaScript. Mostly. See th

18 February 2024 My friend Victor shared this design tip on Twitter last week: He said that if you put the slider values on top, your finger won’t cover them up. It’s a useful tip. But sliders aren’t just bad UX because your finger covers up the values. This is the least of your worries. Here I’ll…

Edit 04/02/24 to change the comparator date from midnight on previous Saturday to midnight on previous Sunday to prevent duplicate links being published. A post that’s been getting a lot of traction recently is I miss human curation by Cassidy Williams, in which she laments that we’re so reliant on…

I have wanted to move this site from Netlify for a while now, but the recent news about their bandwidth pricing made me finally do it. I looked into some alternatives (like Render, Cloudflare, Vercel, etc.) and decided to go with Cloudflare Pages. I liked Cloudflare the best because of their…

I’ve been ragging on Tailwind a lot lately (because it’s terrible). One of the natural follow-up questions I get is… Which CSS framework do you like? I tend to dislike frameworks of all varieties, bec

Companies are rushing to add generated AI capabilities to their products. Some promise to produce front-end components for you. Is that even possible, given the nature of accessibility and the nature of generative AI? And is it desirable? The short answer is no, to both questions. The risk: that our…

In my 2023 wrap-up post I said the following: I also see a gap in publications. CSS-Tricks is done now, and unfortunately, been abandoned. A List Apart has seemingly experienced the same too. At least

You want a quick web performance win at work that’s sure to get you a promotion? Want it to only take five minutes? Then I got you. Capo.js is a tool to get your in order. It’s based on some research by Harry Roberts that shows how something seemingly insignificant as the elements in your tag can…

I recently updated the grid system on my site from Flexbox to CSS Grid. Today, I wanted to share how to use it, how it works under-the-hood, and why I made the switch. Let’s dig in! A responsive grid

Over the last week or two, I’ve written about why Tailwind is bad. Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article from Tero Piirainen comparing semantic CSS to Tailwind… Semantic version is 8 × smaller, rend

We've seen Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Reddit, Automattic, Mozilla — name a company — integrate AI that continues to be trained on public data with or without creator consent. Now, more than ever,

It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean. So it’s been just about 2 years now. This was me and my wife’s thinking: The negotiated sale price was fair. They are a big company (public!)

You might have noticed that I’m starting to share links on here. There’s a hole that’s been left by publications like CSS-Tricks and A List Apart going quiet, along with the Great Fragmentation™ of so

Hi All! 🤗 Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we wan

One of my favourite things to do in my free time is to tinker with this website. Indeed, this website is the culmination of years of tinkering. I have added features like coffee shop maps that I can s

Robb Knight posts 2024-02-19 James wrote a great post with 100 83 ideas for things to do on a website [1] with a call for people suggest more so here's another ten suggestions to add to his list, most

Daily Tips One of the most common accessibility issues I find (and fix) on client projects is dynamically disabled form buttons when a form is being submitted. Today I want to talk about why developers do it, why it’s bad, and what you can do instead. Let’s dig in! Why developers disable buttons…

Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the fluffy…

Automatic Mastodon post embeds I use Nicolas Hoizey’s GitHub action to syndicate my web activity to Mastodon. Recently, I removed the display of webmentions from my posts after seeing Chris and Robb discuss some privacy concerns around them. Upon seeing David Darnes’ mastodon-post web component,…

Yes, this is a clickbait title, but it’s also (mostly) true. If you’re not familiar with Tailwind (bless your heart), it’s a “utility-first CSS framework.” I’ve written about my disdain for Tailwind b

I’ve always associated good design with thoughtfulness. Like, I should be able to point to any element in an interface and the designer should be able to tell me the reasons it’s there. Those reasons may be rooted in user needs or asthetics or some other consideration, but the point is that there’s…

Read later My latest post generated a few emails from people suggesting alternatives to my semi-manual Instapaper solution. The back-and-forth convinced me to describe how I use read later services. I

The mastodon-post Web Component allows you to turn a regular link to a Mastodon post into an embeddable post quote including metadata such as reply count, boost count, favourites and more. Origin Afte

Daily Tips I write a lot about my love of Static Site Generators. They’re fast. Easier to theme. Easier to maintain. Less prone to vulnerabilities. More portable. But they also require you to author your content in markdown. They don’t have a built-in CMS. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug. But if…

I recently replaced the logo on the top left corner with an animated SVG: Inspiration The first time I saw such stroke animations in SVG is the Material Line Icons by Vjacheslav Trushkin. It was cool, but I never thought about making one my own until I saw Mu-An Chiou’s banner on her website. I…