Category: Design

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Blogs and blogging Coding Design Education People Tutorials

How Wes Bos built his new site

I’ve followed Wes Bos for a couple years now. I bought several of his courses, and look forward to when I have time to do his Beginner JavaScript — Learn JavaScript from Scratch course. He recently rebuilt his personal site using Gatsby.JS, and published both a post and a video explaining how he did it:

The details of his site are pretty technical, and the code is available on GitHub if you want to fork the repo, and take a closer look yourself.

I don’t see myself reproducing what he’s done, and building a new site for myself in the foreseeable future. That said, I have tremendous respect for Wes Bos, and how he approaches his work.

He shares openly, offers pricing for his courses that make it much more affordable (I especially appreciate that), and he produces really good quality content.

If you’re interested in how to build a really fast, static site using the Gatsby.JS framework, definitely take a look at his post and video tour. If you’re interested in learning how to code in JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks like React, check out his courses.

🖼 Featured image credit: Wes Bos (I took this version from his GitHub repo).

Categories
Blogs and blogging Design

My new Twenty Twenty look

I decided to switch my site over to the new Twenty Twenty theme that will be released with WordPress 5.3 next week. I downloaded a pre-release version from the GitHub repo, and uploaded it directly.

A fresh coat of Twenty Twenty

I like the default themes that ship with WordPress, and the themes that our team is building. Even though the new generation of themes aren’t perfect*, they’re built for the block editor. I keep forgetting how much flexibility that brings to WordPress.

Preview of the Twenty Twenty theme.

So far, I like this new theme. I think the content container is a bit narrow on a larger screen, so I may tweak that a bit. The mobile view is pretty great, though.

Main image by Anna Kolosyuk

For example, I’d love to see custom fonts return to the Customizer, although with Full Site Editing on the way, we won’t be using the Customizer for much longer.

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Design Events and Life People

… you can create blocks like it’s 1999

I’m watching Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word 2019” from the recent WordCamp US, and almost snorted my tea when he had this to say about the new colour gradients feature for blocks in Gutenberg v6.8:

You can create blocks like it’s 1999 …

Matt Mullenweg, speaking at WCUS 2019

😂

You can find Matt’s keynote here:

Luke Chesser
Categories
Applications Coding Design

Two more Firefox Dev Tools tips for inactive CSS and tracking changes you make

If you spend a fair amount of your time in your browser’s page inspector examining and tweaking CSS, then you’ll probably find these two sets of features in the Firefox Page Inspector to be really helpful.

Track changes you make

Firefox Developer Tools offers a great way to track CSS changes we make while testing CSS solutions for users. Here’s a terrific video that explains how to use this awesome tool:

You can also find information about this in the MDN documentation, here.

Identify and understand inactive CSS

I came across another useful feature of the Firefox Page Inspector. From Firefox 70 (launched in the last few days), you can now see not only which CSS code is inactive, but also why 😲. Here’s an example:

Source: Firefox 70 — a bountiful release for all – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

I haven’t encountered this in practice just yet, but I can already see the explanations to be enormously useful. The links in the pop-ups will take you to the excellent MDN web docs for more information.

You may also want to watch this video explanation too:

Both of these sets of features are really useful!

Categories
Applications Coding Design

The Chrome browser inspector has a very cool feature

Medical inspection tools
Photo by Abby Anaday on Unsplash

I primarily use Firefox Developer Edition as my day to day browser. I use the excellent Firefox page inspector several times a day to troubleshoot issues for our customers, and write CSS for a variety of tweaks on sites that I use.

As much as I enjoy using the Firefox browser inspector, I noticed a feature in the Chrome Dev Tools that I really like, and would love to see introduced to Firefox. It’s bit like a heads-up display that’s very helpful for seeing an element’s styles at a glance.

If I select an element in Firefox, I see fairly basic information about the element such as the element’s dimensions, and the type of element it is, like this:

Selecting an element in the Firefox page inspector

On the other hand, when I select the same element using the Chrome browser inspector, I see more information about the element, like this:

Selecting an element with the Chrome page inspector

Chrome provides not only information about the image’s dimensions, and the type of element it is, but also other useful information such as the font color, style, and margins (in this case).

Even though I can see all the details of the element in each browser’s inspector panel, this extra information when I select an element is a really nice touch.

unsplash-logoFeatured image by Abby Anaday
Categories
Coding Design Social Web

Owning your tweets

Photo by Ridham Nagralawala on Unsplash

I really like how Zach Leatherman has taken control over his tweets, and is sharing them on his site with some great analytics. He provides some insights into how he’s taking his tweets, and republishing them on his site in his post “I’m Taking Ownership of My Tweets” –

I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.

Zach Leatherman

I started doing something similar on a test site here: @pauljacobson tweets – All the tweets

My test site uses a relatively old plugin that hasn’t been updated recently. At the same time, it seems to be working relatively called Ozh’ Tweet Archiver. I prefer how Zach has formatted his tweets, and how the images and links are modified for more sustainable presentation on the assumption that Twitter has gone offline.

I also really like how he’s captured replies, and has added analytics to his tweets to surface all sorts of insights such as more popular tweets, retweets data, and more.

I’ve love to know how he’s actually capturing, and reformatting his tweets, but I don’t see a link to the code he’s using for this. I’d eventually like to bring something like that to this site, so this site becomes a complete archive of my tweets too.

At least with the Ozh’ Tweet Archiver plugin running on my test site, I’ll have a WordPress archive that I can readily import as a starting point. I’d like to have linked media load from my site, and not as embeds from Twitter, for example. The idea here is to capture your tweets, and preserve them so they contain their links and media should Twitter no longer exist.

unsplash-logoFeatured image by Ridham Nagralawala
Categories
Coding Design Education Tutorials

A CSS Grid refresher with Mozilla

I really like CSS Grid for layouts. My challenge is that I tend not to use it all that much in my day-to-day work (I provide a fair amount of CSS support, but it tends to be focused on narrower issues), so I don’t practice it all that much. Then, when I return to CSS Grid, I don’t remember any of the syntax beyond display: grid; 😜

Fortunately there are loads of resources online to learn CSS Grid. The latest is a video by Miriam Suzanne on the Mozilla Developer channel, titled “Build a Classic Layout FAST in CSS Grid” –

My favourite CSS Grid resources also include the MDN guide “CSS Grid Layout – CSS: Cascading Style Sheets“, and Wes Bos’ terrific CSS Grid YouTube series:

Categories
Design Games

Machine assisted bowling – this might be considered cheating 🎳

This is funny. Pretty sure this doesn’t comply with bowling rules (whatever those may be):

I’m not sure if this is a real robot, but it’s pretty awesome either way.