Copilot me if you can A short tale about how GitHub Copilot generated some “real” data about my website. published Wednesday, December 7th, 2022 article
The Environment-Aware Wrapper Here’s a handy CSS technique to make sure your content isn’t obscured by the pesky notch that seems to be present on many phones these days, and it probably already fits nicely into your existing codebase! published Sunday, October 30th, 2022 article
Moving Targets I was just working on some styling changes to my website and fell into a rabbit-hole on URLs, the <mark> element and :target pseudo-class, and ended up writing an animation as a handy technique for drawing the reader’s attention. published Wednesday, October 19th, 2022 article
📝 Bread Rolls The best I’ve ever had, made by my Mum every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and always gone faster than you’d hoped. published Thursday, October 13th, 2022 recipe
in reply to eleventy-cache-webmentions Happy to announce that I’ve released version 1.0.0 of Eleventy Cache Webmentions! Although it introduces some breaking changes for earlier versions, 1.0.0 makes it a lot easier to attach Webmentions to your pages as data using eleventyComputed. Check out my… published Tuesday, September 13th, 2022 note
A Case for the 1-Dimensional Grid Reaching for Grid might feel like overkill for a one-column layout, but I hope this technique shows how useful it is in understanding what your CSS is doing! published Tuesday, September 6th, 2022 1 response to A Case for the 1-Dimensional Grid article
Webmention Setup for Eleventy Here’s a quick run-through of how I retrieve and utilise Webmentions with my Eleventy website. published Thursday, August 25th, 2022 1 response to Webmention Setup for Eleventy article
It’s all relative! What’s the deal with relative units? Let’s find out. published Monday, August 15th, 2022 1 response to It’s all relative! article
in reply to eleventy-cache-webmentions Just updated eleventy-cache-webmentions to version 0.2.0, a shallow first attempt at making the package work with any Webmention server, not just Webmention.io. published Tuesday, June 14th, 2022 note
I’ve got a quick little nugget of CSS to share today, a selector containing all interactive content. published Tuesday, May 17th, 2022 note
in reply to a previous note Happy to say the sparklines are going well—pushed an update yesterday, in fact, to allow them to inherit the color of wherever they are in the DOM for the colour of the line itself. Still working on posting a bit more!… published Sunday, May 15th, 2022 note
Changing with the times Lessons learned, pieces of wisdom (and folly), and other things I have to say after running a website blog for a while. published Wednesday, May 11th, 2022 4 responses to Changing with the times article
The Beloved Refactor Following the incredible high from a great conference, I just finished an extremely refreshing refactor of the CSS on my site. Here’s what I did. published Wednesday, May 11th, 2022 article
in reply to eleventy-cache-webmentions Fixed a bug in eleventy-cache-webmentions from a silly assumption I made about determining a since value to get new Webmentions when the cache exists. published Saturday, January 15th, 2022 note
10000 It’s been nearly nine years since I last updated my website's logo, the ethereal Raven, but sixteen years since I began my journey into web development. To commemorate reaching a 5-bit milestone, this year seemed like a good one to… published Thursday, January 13th, 2022 3 responses to 10000 note
Fun stuff I’m proud of achieving on my website recently: finished building and released eleventy-cache-webmentions as a working and publicly-avaliable Eleventy plugin, which automates retrieving and sorting of Webmentions as well as being as kind as possible to the Webmention.io API automatic… published Sunday, December 5th, 2021 note
in reply to a previous note Update: still not caught my own tail—I'll get back to that when I find my way out of these rabbit holes, and on that note, I bumped up to 1.708 commits/day as of today. Continue to do with that information what… published Monday, November 29th, 2021 note
Deep Dive into Colour How to make powerful use of CSS Variables, colour spaces, and the cascade using Bowhead. updated Wednesday, May 11th, 2022 published Sunday, November 28th, 2021 2 responses to Deep Dive into Colour article
Finally figured out the problem with how I was caching Webmention avatars. One of those typos that got away for… maybe more than a year?… published Wednesday, November 24th, 2021 note
Over the last couple of months I’ve made some small improvements and additions to 🐋 Bowhead, which is now at version 0.2.1. Since last posting about it, I’ve cleaned up the documentation, added some minor bits and pieces, and used… published Thursday, August 26th, 2021 note
Time to Cache Up For a long time I’ve been searching for a sound solution to storing the entire Webmention history of my blog, as packaging it up with the rest of the repository was not cutting it for me. Enter the world of async. updated Monday, January 24th, 2022 published Monday, November 23rd, 2020 12 responses to Time to Cache Up article
I've been going through @wesbos’ JavaScript30 challenges, enjoying it a lot, and I completed challenge #17 today. Check out my log of completed challenges, follow along with RSS, or even join in if you’re interested! published Friday, October 23rd, 2020 note
Discovered that I can make custom waveforms for use with my noisy sparklines. Swapped from the humble sine wave to a an "Ahh" sound—like I used to go crazy for on early MIDI keyboards! published Thursday, September 10th, 2020 note
🚚 Bowhead is now at version 0.1.8, which adds a few things and fixes others, namely cleaning up what files are packaged for npm so as to send as little as necessary. If you're looking for a barebones SCSS solution for… published Monday, September 7th, 2020 note
📦 Packaged up a bit of SCSS I’ve been happily using into a thing called Bowhead (it’s a whale, but I totally swear the filesize is tiny) and I’d love your feedback! https://chrisburnell.com/bowhead/ published Wednesday, August 26th, 2020 note
in reply to a previous note Eleventy is a go! Managed to migrate all of my content, pages, and a whole lot more. Article about the transition coming soon! published Thursday, August 6th, 2020 note
Finally made a solid start on my rebuild on Eleventy. Hoping to get all the content-y stuff finished up tomorrow, then time to think about redesign. 😬 published Wednesday, June 10th, 2020 1 response to note
I must be in a bad mood this morning because @_iamarek told me, “you look like someone was using tabs” (instead of spaces) and I can't disagree published Tuesday, February 25th, 2020 note
Shoutout to the good ol' days when @ForgottenMG, @pwiddop, @redsoniafb and I would get amazing Malaysian food for lunch as the Ninja Turtles :') published Friday, January 24th, 2020 1 response to note
Sassy Lobotomised Owl Managing spacing between elements and components on your page can be a tiring task if undertaken manually. This is where the lobotomised owl comes in: a short, simple snippet of CSS that simplifies this whole process for you. In this article I’ll explain how I make use of it in a more dynamic way using a SCSS mixin. updated Monday, November 29th, 2021 published Tuesday, January 14th, 2020 33 responses to Sassy Lobotomised Owl article
Pig's Ear Beer Festival, third year going. As usual, couldn't be happier, but seriously missing @dletorey! published Friday, December 6th, 2019 2 responses to note
🥖 Made some bomb-ass warm and fluffy breadsticks last night. They were far more amazing than my terrible photo of them, honest. 🗒 Recipe here: https://chrisburnell.com/recipe/breadsticks published Wednesday, November 27th, 2019 2 responses to note
📝 Breadsticks A recipe by Tastes Better From Scratch published Wednesday, November 27th, 2019 3 responses to Breadsticks recipe
@RealSnarkyPuppy at @RoyalAlbertHall last night. Unbelievable show! published Friday, November 15th, 2019 note
Recently tucked away a bulk of the meta information about my posts behind a visibility-toggling button. Not sure it's the best solution for my meta-heavy posts, but cleans things up for now, at least. published Monday, October 28th, 2019 note
Interesting. Everyone who insists I should be more involved and interested in politics seems to have a very specific context they want me to get involved in. Almost like they have an agenda and what I think doesn't actually matter to… published Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 1 response to note
The Flip-Flop Technique I recently implemented a colour scheme toggler in the footer of my website, following Andy Bell’s guide, Create a user controlled dark or light mode, and found a wonky but fun alternative solution for styling my dark theme which leverages CSS’s filter property. updated Monday, September 7th, 2020 published Friday, August 30th, 2019 11 responses to The Flip-Flop Technique article
Shout-out to @codefundio https://codefund.io for their fantastic service and above-and-beyond team. I cannot state strongly enough how kind and understanding they are—they get the highest possible recommendation from me! published Thursday, August 15th, 2019 8 responses to note
Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦 Hope it’s a good one, eh! 🍁 published Monday, July 1st, 2019 3 responses to note
in reply to Reply Targets, a previous article @Anonymous Do you have any ideas how to present this metadata in a way such that information doesn’t get lost? published Monday, June 24th, 2019 note
@monosnap Figured I’d add to the heap of people reminding you that your subscription model is laughably bad and has lost all trust I ever had in your company. published Thursday, June 20th, 2019 note
Reply Targets Providing a useful context to content written in response to someone else's blog post, tweet, toot, etc. helps a reader to understand the conversational nature of these back-and-forths. What abstractions can we make to the data that holds these reply targets, and how can those abstractions make for a richer reading experience and for a leaner publishing workflow? updated Wednesday, June 26th, 2019 published Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 6 responses to Reply Targets article
in reply to a previous note I think I'm going to try to make this happen. For a long time I have been building my site on a mostly vanilla Jekyll set-up as an example of a complex site that works on GitHub Pages, but I… published Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 note
I would love to try switching my site from @jekyllrb onto @eleven_ty, but it looks like such a huge undertaking, as I have heavily customised the way I use Jekyll. Anyone got any pointers or quick changes I can make… published Monday, June 10th, 2019 1 response to note
So I decided today to remove trailing slashes from my URLs and forgot that it would affect the URLs of posts in my feeds. Apologies if I’ve bombarded you with old entries! published Monday, June 3rd, 2019 note
Another 🐇 🕳 idea… Input a YouTube channel URL → The channel’s Atom feed is added to your Microsub "YouTube" channel. YouTube subscriptions without a Google account. No idea how original this idea is, but for now I’ve built https://chrisburnell.com/get-youtube-feed/ published Friday, May 3rd, 2019 note
I still fail to see what benefits arise from shortened variable names. Why is "currPag" preferable to "currentPage", "btn" preferable to "button"? Without context, I'm guessing what the author intended, and this only makes verbal discussions about it all the… published Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 1 response to note
Up too late, again, working on my latest rabbit hole project. So close!… but got to sleep. published Friday, April 5th, 2019 note
@untappd_support Who should I contact about my application for an API key? It’s been way more than 10 days, and I don’t think my application has been rejected, but I don’t know for sure… published Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019 2 responses to note
If I ever get Untappd API access I would love to try writing some code to help people syndicate check-ins, toasts, comments, etc. back to their own websites. Another rabbit hole for another day. published Saturday, March 30th, 2019 1 response to note
📝 Buffalo Sauce Throw this on some wings and you're off to the races. published Thursday, March 14th, 2019 recipe
LiquidBase60 I have started auto-generating short-URLs for each of my posts, old and new, and opted to implement Tantek Çelik's NewBase60 for representing the unique URLs, but I've done so with Liquid so it plays nicely with my Jekyll-powered website. updated Saturday, August 8th, 2020 published Monday, March 4th, 2019 article
Sparkline Sound-Off I have been following in the footsteps of Jeremy Keith for a few months now. Dotted around my website, now, are sparklines, representing my activity over time. As an added bonus, a little tune based on the sparkline's values plays when you click on it. With a moderate amount of musical theory under my belt, here's how I accomplished that audio delight. updated Thursday, October 21st, 2021 published Monday, March 4th, 2019 5 responses to Sparkline Sound-Off article
Lifelong Superpowers A handful of my superpowers: I always sit on the second sock when I sit down to put on the first. I always check the time at 12:34. But what happens if my first superpower ever fails? Does my day shift enough to… published Tuesday, February 26th, 2019 6 responses to Lifelong Superpowers note
Eight Years Overjoyed to be celebrating the greatest milestone of my life today. Eight wonderful years with my best friend, girlfriend, partner in crime, and love of my life, Rachel. Stoked for the next byte! published Friday, February 8th, 2019 8 responses to Eight Years note
Late night coding means I’ve managed to create a clear division between my website’s various post types. And alongside that, I’m now using NewBase60 for my shortened URLs, which happens for each of my posts automatically. 😌 published Sunday, January 13th, 2019 note
Switched my main browser from Chrome to Firefox this week. Can’t say I miss anything in particular. Only gripe so far is having to change my muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts, which I’m sure will be a quick transition. published Thursday, December 20th, 2018 6 responses to note
I gave a lightning talk in 2016 about writing readable and maintainable code, and @DvBerzon is doing some fantastic research in this area that really intrigues me. I’m eagerly waiting for the next phase of research and results! http://howreadable.com/ published Tuesday, December 11th, 2018 3 responses to note
I un-linked my Facebook account from Spotify a little less than a month ago. So here’s my year of music #SpotifyWrapped ☹️ published Thursday, December 6th, 2018 1 response to note
Super pleased to say that I just gave a short presentation about #indieweb to my team at work, and I didn’t butcher the explanation too badly, so everyone’s on-board! Feels great to be a part of this community and welcome… published Thursday, December 6th, 2018 5 responses to note
Been looking forward to Pig’s Ear Beer Festival since last year. I'm in heaven. published Wednesday, December 5th, 2018 3 responses to note
At long last, I’ve managed to add the ability to edit my existing notes through my Micropub endpoint, and given my track record of totally making no mistakes, this is a good thing. #indieweb published Tuesday, December 4th, 2018 3 responses to note
Listened to Hardwired, a new EP by @mitch_murder, just about all weekend, and I can’t recommend it enough! Check it out if you’re into punchy 80s synths https://mitchmurder.bandcamp.com/album/hardwired published Monday, December 3rd, 2018 note
I’ve made an average of 1.498 commits/day to my website over the last 5.5 years. ~670 of those commits contained fix in the commit message. Do with that information what you will while I continue to endlessly chase my own tail. published Thursday, November 29th, 2018 6 responses to note
Numerals, Romanticised For a better part of the year, I've been working on a Jekyll-based Progressive Web App, BloodBuilder, for managing my Sorcerer in a game of Pathfinder I've been playing with some friends. One of the many intricate parts of logic involves the ability to convert Arabic numerals to and from Roman numerals, so I wrote a simple Liquid include to handle this. published Wednesday, November 7th, 2018 1 response to Numerals, Romanticised article
I’ve sat down with three developers this week to help them diagnose some errors, but as soon as I sat down the errors mysteriously vanished. Anyway, hit me up if you want a quote for me to come sit next… published Friday, November 2nd, 2018 5 responses to note
Variables for Both Now that CSS Custom Properties, or CSS Variables, are becoming a solid standard, I'm using a method to map their values to CSS Variables whilst providing a value-as-is fallback using a straightforward syntax in a SCSS function and mixin. updated Thursday, May 6th, 2021 published Monday, October 15th, 2018 9 responses to Variables for Both article
Learned today that the price to renew a domain I’ve owned for several years has increased by ten times because it’s a premium domain. RIP nyer.audio. published Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 2 responses to note
Been waiting a while for this, and boy, does it ever deliver. https://open.spotify.com/album/2MdTsQBOs71AZuqETMyLY2 published Thursday, October 4th, 2018 note
Been keeping track of musical albums I’ve enjoyed recently at /music. Let me know if you have any recommendations I should check out! published Thursday, October 4th, 2018 note
If this makes it onto Mastodon 👋, it means my Micropub endpoint is syndicating correctly! published Monday, October 1st, 2018 note
Living Deliberately I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that… published Monday, October 1st, 2018 4 responses to Living Deliberately note
DB5 Had the joy of visiting the Bond in Motion at @ldnfilmmuseum a few weeks ago and got to see this bad boy DB5 in all its (blue-tinted) splendor. published Thursday, September 13th, 2018 13 responses to DB5 note
Couldn't be happier with how #SotB18 turned out this year. It was an honour and a pleasure to be involved in organising such an incredible event. Massive thanks to all of our speakers, attendees, sponsors, and supporters. We couldn't have… published Saturday, September 8th, 2018 12 responses to note
Today at #hwclondon I’ll be attempting to enable my Micropub endpoint to accept JSON #indieweb published Wednesday, July 25th, 2018 1 response to note
Rolling my own Micropub server is proving immensely difficult. Way out of my depth. Feels good to learn, albeit slowly, though. published Thursday, June 21st, 2018 1 response to note
Mugged Drinking coffee out of a sub-standard mug today because some mug has taken my mug! published Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 7 responses to Mugged note
Added Jeremy Keith’s Canvas Sparklines to my site, to further visually demonstrate the vast spaces of time between my posts! Next step: create less vast spaces of time between my posts (read: publish more). published Tuesday, May 15th, 2018 1 response to note
At my first Homebrew Website Club meetup! Planning how to roll my own micropub endpoint... #hwclondon #indieweb published Wednesday, January 24th, 2018 6 responses to note
Crossing Guards Throttle back on your scroll events and watch out for the IntersectionObserver! published Thursday, November 9th, 2017 3 responses to Crossing Guards article
No Three Snowflakes Are Alike I developed a Sass function to generate a list of unique pairs given a List or Map of data, so I extrapolated the idea and refactored the function to generate a series of unique groups of size n. published Friday, November 3rd, 2017 article
Every rose has its thorn. @CodePen just crashed on me for the first time in over a year. Still using it everyday though. 😄 published Wednesday, October 25th, 2017 1 response to note
This is my first Note that I'm posting and syndicating automatically! published Wednesday, October 18th, 2017 note
Anyone using IntersectionObserver seen intersectionRatio>1? I’ve been rounding this attribute, toFixed(n), to help keep things clean. published Sunday, October 15th, 2017 note
Unique Pairs in SCSS In creating a from-scratch grid for a redevelopment project, I was using SCSS to loop through various bits of data to generate a bunch of repetitive CSS, but I realised I had no DRY way of generating a list of unique pairs of items from a given dataset, so I set out to find out how. published Friday, June 16th, 2017 2 responses to Unique Pairs in SCSS article
Remapping Ranges in Sass Great inspiration can sometimes be found in exploring available opportunities and embracing new ideas. In this article, I'll try to replicate a foreign concept in a familiar way, and explain why I decided to even do it. published Thursday, June 15th, 2017 article
April LWS Talk I gave a talk at London Web Standards and asked the question, So how can we write media queries that are both consistent and succinct? published Friday, April 29th, 2016 article
🗣 Supporting Middle-Out in CSS My first ever talk, given at London Web Standards. published Monday, April 18th, 2016 2 responses to Supporting Middle-Out in CSS talk
Shoot for the Moon Don't be half-minded when dealing with fractions and pixels. How can we ensure all browsers interpret fractions in our CSS equally? published Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016 article
An Extended Response If you've dabbled in Sass before, you're likely familiar with @extend and @mixin, but is there any use-case for @extend? Given the benchmark performance of the two, can we still be confident in the cascade when @extending in Sass? published Friday, March 18th, 2016 article
Backscratching Revisited I revised my original technique for styling default elements and took it a step further to scratch the greatest number of backs. published Monday, June 8th, 2015 article
Theming Pinboard I recently decided I would embark on the task of theming Pinboard. Here's how I did it. published Thursday, March 12th, 2015 article
On Your Marks, Get Set, Wait What's really important when reading an article online? Content should always come first, and give users the option for more later. updated Monday, January 25th, 2016 published Monday, September 22nd, 2014 article
A Slice of Heaven We know that webpages are composed of text and boxes. Lots and lots of boxes. But with the power and might of CSS3 we can do some fancy stuff that never used to be possible. published Wednesday, August 27th, 2014 article
Let’s Look Back I haven't published a new article in a while now, but I haven't been twiddling my thumbs. Let's look at what happened behind-the-scenes in the last eight months since my first article. published Sunday, February 9th, 2014 2 responses to Let’s Look Back article
I’ll Scratch Your Back, And Mine Too I've been playing around with CSS content and attribute selectors recently, and came across a useful trick for styling default elements. updated Saturday, June 6th, 2015 published Tuesday, October 29th, 2013 article
Viewport Woes I've been around the block and seen many variations of variables and syntax in viewport meta tags. What's the correct way to go about it? And maybe I'll comment on the state of browsers today as well. published Thursday, August 29th, 2013 article
Persistent Shadows How easy is it to keep a shadow's direction consistent whilst rotating an element? published Tuesday, June 18th, 2013 article
Annoying Navigation CSS Navigation is crucial to a functional website. It is how your users find the information they're after; get it right, and your users are happy—get it wrong, and they go insane! published Sunday, June 16th, 2013 article
First Article Ever Well, I've finally gotten my site up and running to a point where I can consider it to be a success. What was the process, and what did it involve? What mistakes did I make that you can avoid? published Saturday, June 15th, 2013 article
