Featured

All of my featured posts, dating from 2013–2020.

2020 (32)

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 10 September 2020

The True Story of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore

“Early Singapore’s authoritarian competency is a model invoked by leaders from China to Rwanda. But its rise was complex, messy, and the result of long factional battles. There are hard limits to how far it can be exported.”

published 07 September 2020

🚚 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 07 September 2020

Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb

Ana Rodrigues perfectly lays out what the IndieWeb is all about, along with the why’s and how’s of getting involved!

published 27 August 2020

📦 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 26 August 2020

IA Basics

My great friend, Tom, has written a super-comprehensive article about IA: a topic I’m lacking in serious experience with!

published 11 August 2020

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 06 August 2020

Uncommon CSS Properties

Some useful gems in here I had no idea about!

published 07 July 2020

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 10 June 2020 · 1 response

The samsui women of Singapore

An interesting read about the history of my girlfriend's paternal grandmother, detailing the lives of women who immigrated to Singapore.

published 23 May 2020

Every Noise at Once

A serious rabbit-hole deep-dive into musical genres that's uniquely presented.

published 21 May 2020

The World-Wide Work

This resonates with me time and time again. Such a powerful talk.

published 22 April 2020

Element.focus vs aria-activedescendant

When you build JavaScript components, you need to manage focus for both keyboard users and screen readers. The WAI-ARIA specs say there are two ways to manage focus

published 08 April 2020

Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially

Incredible visualisations and information from Washington Post.

published 17 March 2020

Fraidycat

This is so freaking cool. “Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome [you can] use to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose”. Warm, fuzzy, IndieWeb vibes from this one!

published 12 March 2020

Build a light and global state system - Piccalilli

“Using Proxies and subscriber functions, we can create an observable, reactive state system with a tiny footprint.”

published 11 March 2020

Getting the easy stuff right ･ Robin Rendle

It me.

published 11 March 2020

HTML: The Inaccessible Parts

Dave Rupert gives an extremely thorough run-through of numerous gotchas to do with writing HTML you might think is accessible, but isn't quite what it seems.

published 28 February 2020

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 25 February 2020

Desktop Goose

“A downloadable goose-sperience for Windows and macOS”

published 24 February 2020

In-Browser Performance Linting With Feature Policies

“Feature-Policy is a relatively new feature that lets you opt-in or out of certain browser features on your site.” Tim Kadlec runs through performance linting using feature policies.

published 21 February 2020

A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons

CSS-Tricks' complete guide to links, buttons, and button-like inputs in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

published 19 February 2020

Some Imaginary CSS

“The other day I was using CSS grid and custom properties to solve some problems that would have seemed almost impossible only a year or two ago. This made me wonder: What CSS could I be writing in a few…

published 19 February 2020

Neumorphism/Soft UI CSS shadow generator

Generate clever and gorgeous CSS shadows with this simple tool.

published 13 February 2020

Fluid custom properties

Trys, once again, taking things to the next level with CSS locks, CSS properties, media queries, and the cascade to create incredibly dynamic and fluid layouts.

published 07 February 2020

GT Alpina by Grilli Type

Amazing demo for this variable font.

published 29 January 2020

Shoutout to the good ol' days when @ForgottenMG, @pwiddop, @redsoniafb and I would get amazing Malaysian food for lunch as the Ninja Turtles :')

published 24 January 2020 · 1 response

Canadian Stock Photography

REALLY Canadian. I have a slightly embarrassing feeling I'll be using these.

published 23 January 2020

The CSS Cascade

Not only is this beautiful and a joy to read, it's chock-full of of useful info about how CSS' cascading.

published 22 January 2020

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.

published 14 January 2020 · 15 responses

The Accessibility of Styled Form Controls

A repository of styled and styled form control elements and markup patterns, and how they are announced by screen readers.

published 10 January 2020

Simplified Fluid Typography | CSS-Tricks

With min(), max(), and clamp() we can greatly simplify how we define fluid property values in CSS—can't wait for for wider browser support!

published 06 January 2020

2019 (86)

Tourtière

A recipe by my grandmother, Louise

published 21 December 2019

Dynamic, Date-Based Color with JavaScript, HSL, and CSS Variables | Rob Weychert

“A rational system for generating thousands of possible color schemes.”

published 16 December 2019

Leonardo

“Create beautiful, accessible, and adaptive color systems using contrast-ratio based generated colors.”

published 16 December 2019

Neal.fun

Bringing back the weird web!

published 13 December 2019

Accessible Color Spaces - Color Contrast Tool

This is such an amazing tool for visualising colour and contrast that'll help you confidently meet your accessibility requirements. It can even provide closest accessible colours, so it really takes away a huge amount of the manual work and difficulty…

published 13 December 2019

Pig's Ear Beer Festival, third year going. As usual, couldn't be happier, but seriously missing @dletorey!

published 06 December 2019 · 2 responses

JournalBook

From the venerable Trys Mudford comes JournalBook, a private, offline-first personal journal.

published 06 December 2019

Binary Music Player

Another bit of clever fun from Tim Holman—this time building some fun musical melodies by counting in binary, and you can customise the notes too!

published 04 December 2019

Masking GIFs with other GIFs

A super-fun technique for using SVG to mask one GIF on top of another.

published 03 December 2019

Ordered Error Diffusion Dithering

I admit that I don’t understand a lot of the math going on here, but I’m very interested in the output.

published 02 December 2019

🥖 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 27 November 2019 · 3 responses

Breadsticks

A recipe by Tastes Better From Scratch

published 27 November 2019 · 5 responses

Excited for @halfstackconf today! First conference with @dletorey where neither of us are organising too.

published 22 November 2019 · 1 response

giffgaff design

This is a set of standards that define the universal design language and content composition at giffgaff.

published 21 November 2019

@RealSnarkyPuppy at @RoyalAlbertHall last night. Unbelievable show!

published 15 November 2019

The Web Almanac

HTTP Archive's annual state of the web report. This is *super-comprehensive* and is jam-packed with useful information.

published 13 November 2019

Codevember

“Codevember is a challenge for developers to sharpen their creativity and improve their skills. The goal is to build a creative piece of code every day of November.”

published 29 October 2019

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 28 October 2019

Pancakes

A recipe

published 25 October 2019

GitSheet

A dead simple git cheatsheet.

published 14 October 2019

Advanced Lesson of the Firefox Font Editor

In this YouTube video, Jen Simmons gives a thorough run-through of Firefox's Font Editor in its Dev Tools.

published 09 October 2019

Keep a Changelog

Everything you need to know about changelogs, and presented beautifully as well.

published 03 October 2019

Compound Grid Generator

A little tool to generate compound grids by Michelle Barker. Enter the number of columns for each of your grids, and they’ll be magically merged into a compound grid.

published 25 September 2019

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 25 September 2019 · 1 response

3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image

Simon Niklaus, Long Mai, Jimei Yang and Feng Liu have made an incredible framework for automatically synthesising a parallax/Ken Burns effect from a single source image. Check out the video!

published 18 September 2019

ASCIICKER

It boggles the mind how much effort went into building this, and how clean it is!

published 18 September 2019

An ode to OpenType

Fall in love with the secret world of fonts

published 10 September 2019

Leon Sans

This has to be the coolest typeface demo I've ever seen, hands down.

published 02 September 2019

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 I found a wonky but fun alternative solution for styling my dark theme which leverages CSS’s filter property.

published 30 August 2019 · updated 07 September 2020 · 4 responses

vi is a language

Until reading this, I’ve been stumbling around feeling frustrated that I can't seem to find any efficiency in my use of the language. This is exactly what I needed to read to get into and grok vi.

published 20 August 2019

Use snippets in VS Code

Arek’s got Part 2 of his Tips & Tricks for VS Code where he shows you how to save time and keystrokes by using snippets!

published 20 August 2019

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 15 August 2019 · 8 responses

Using the aria-current attribute

Ever used an active or current class to denote/style a navigation element? Léonie demonstrates how to use the aria-current attribute to do the same coupled with the boon to accessibility it brings.

published 15 August 2019

Create a user controlled dark or light mode

Andy Bell breaks down implementing robust theme-switching functionality on your own site.

published 14 August 2019

Styling title bars in VS Code

I find this useful when switching between multiple windows. Written by my good friend, Arek.

published 13 August 2019

Foreign Rap

Foreignrap is a platform to discover + enjoy international rap music. Run by enthusiasts, we share sounds from across the world for you to enjoy 🙏

published 29 July 2019

Poolside FM

Get on loser! We’re going POOLSIDE

published 26 July 2019

SVG Calendar showing todays date in Squiz Matrix

My good friend, Dave, has remixed Terence Eden's SVG with JavaScript calendar icon to be powered by keywords in Matrix (a CMS developed by Squiz).

published 23 July 2019

Making an interactive hoverboard game using JavaScript and web sockets

The internet is full of amazing people building amazing things, including this! I'm so inspired by projects like this.

published 10 July 2019

Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦 Hope it’s a good one, eh! 🍁

published 01 July 2019 · 3 responses

CSS and Network Performance

Invaluable tips on CSS and Network Performance from Harry Roberts

published 01 July 2019

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 24 June 2019

Every Layout

Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS.

published 21 June 2019

@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 20 June 2019

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?

published 19 June 2019 · 4 responses

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 19 June 2019

Drawing Realistic Clouds with SVG and CSS

Equally as interesting as the technique on display is Beau Jackson’s explanation of this incredible, photo-realistic combination of SVG and CSS to draw clouds!

published 13 June 2019

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 10 June 2019 · 1 response

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 03 June 2019

Appscope - Progressive Web Apps Examples

“Appscope is a directory of Progressive Web Apps, showcasing the best PWA examples. All apps listed run entirely in the web browser and launch instantly without an app download. If you wish, they can be saved to your home screen…

published 02 June 2019

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 03 May 2019

Fornacalia

If, like me, you’re getting into baking your own bread, there may be no better teacher than Jeremy Cherfas, who’s been baking bread for over 50 years. His website is chock-full of useful information, recipes, and anecdotes to keep your…

published 02 May 2019

Web Design Experiments by Jen Simmons

Jen Simmons’ demos and experiments were instrumental in my learning CSS Grid, and even if you already know your way around the spec blindfolded, I guarantee you’ll find something new and interesting here!

published 30 April 2019

The Farce of Record Store Day

My very good friend, Dave, outlines what Record Store Day is, why movements like these are important, and why this particular once has fallen short. Wise words from seriously big fan of music.

published 26 April 2019

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 09 April 2019 · 2 responses

The Celebrated New Miscellany of Mr. Simon Collison

The design Simon presented here in 2010 was and still is as beautiful as it was illuminating, right at the cusp of responsive design on the web.

published 09 April 2019

Up too late, again, working on my latest rabbit hole project. So close!… but got to sleep.

published 05 April 2019

How Not To Sort By Average Rating – Evan Miller

PROBLEM: You are a web programmer. You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. You need some sort of score to sort by.

published 03 April 2019 · 1 response

@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 obviously I don’t know for sure…

published 02 April 2019 · 4 responses

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 30 March 2019 · 1 response

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS

I tend to write quite verbosely and as a result end up with big, unruly blocks of text in my articles. Thanks to Richard, I've learned a bit more about how hyphens and how they can help!

published 29 March 2019

An Illustrated (and Musical) Guide to Map, Reduce, and Filter Array Methods

I've struggled for a little while to wrap my head around these new methods, but this article by Una Kravets couldn't have made them any easier or fun to understand!

published 26 March 2019

Sophisticated Partitioning with CSS Grid

Equally as impressive as Rob Weychert's 'Tinnitus Tracker' is the CSS Grid that powers it. This article and accompanying code is so thorough and cleanly-thought through. What a joy to read and see in action.

published 26 March 2019

1% Better • Robin Rendle

This really resonates with me—too often I've planned or been part of planning a big project that fizzles out and burns people out after months. Most of my productivity and positive output has been the outcome of quick, iterative improvements.

published 22 March 2019

Celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach

Compose a two-measure melody and machine learning will harmonise with your tune! This is basically magic to me.

published 21 March 2019

Quill

Quill is a simple Micropub client for creating posts on your own website. To use it, your website will need to have a Micropub endpoint, and this app will send requests to it to create posts.

published 17 March 2019

Buffalo Sauce

Throw this on some wings and you're off to the races.

published 14 March 2019

Tamago

A recipe

published 14 March 2019

An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms

This is one of the most clever and interesting interactive demos I've ever seen. Worth setting aside time to go through the whole thing!

published 05 March 2019

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.

published 04 March 2019 · updated 08 August 2020

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.

published 04 March 2019 · 5 responses

How to Create a Fake 3D Image Effect with WebGL

“Learn how to create an interactive "fake" 3D effect for images with depth maps and plain WebGL.”

published 28 February 2019

Color Spaces – Bartosz Ciechanowski

“For the longest time we didn’t have to pay a lot of attention to the way we talk about color. The modern display technologies capable of showing more vivid shades have, for better or for worse, changed the rules of…

published 28 February 2019

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 26 February 2019 · 5 responses

A talk by Dave Letorey … and you thought you had no issues

My very good friend, Dave, gave an incredible talk on accessibility at the recent Monki Gras conference in London. Worth every second of watching!

published 21 February 2019

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 08 February 2019 · 8 responses

NES.css

NES.css is a NES-style CSS Framework.

published 18 January 2019

Uncanny Valley Studio

Not your typical portfolio website. Absolutely mind-blowing.

published 15 January 2019

Burger Buns

A recipe by Taste of Home

published 14 January 2019

The Flexbox Holy Albatross Reincarnated

Revamped and updated version of the original.

published 14 January 2019

The Flexbox Holy Albatross

Who even needs media queries anymore? Not Heydon Pickering, that's who.

published 13 January 2019

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 13 January 2019

Monocle

I've really enjoyed using this as my Microsub reader for the last few weeks. Combined with X-Ray, it's been pretty trivial to debug my feeds!

published 13 January 2019

CSS doesn’t suck

Front-end communities have been up-in-arms recently about CSS's shortcomings (and how they compare to JS's shortcomings, for example). I think CSS has been undeservedly been painted in a poor light, but Andy Bell's article had me nodding enthusiastically throughout.

published 11 January 2019

Web A Skeb

Childhood Picassos, your time has come again.

published 09 January 2019

Chrono Trigger: Secret of the Forest - Reuben Gingrich

I'm clearly cruising on a Chrono Trigger vibe because, again, I need to share some music by some unquestionably-talented musicians, @reubengingrich http://reubengingrich.com/) But how can you not love Secret of the Forest?

published 03 January 2019 · 2 responses

2018 (36)

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 20 December 2018 · 6 responses

Chrono Trigger: Secret of the Forest - Contraband VGM

This is seriously amazing. It deserves way more recognition than it has; @ContraReloaded mesh together some incredible talent and synergy.

published 13 December 2018 · 7 responses

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 11 December 2018 · 3 responses

I un-linked my Facebook account from Spotify a little less than a month ago. So here’s my year of music #SpotifyWrapped ☹️

published 06 December 2018 · 1 response

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 06 December 2018 · 5 responses

Been looking forward to Pig’s Ear Beer Festival since last year. I'm in heaven.

published 05 December 2018 · 3 responses

Lynn Fisher’s Portfolio

I wish I could create animations this beautiful. Lynn Fisher demonstrates her god-like abilities with yet another gorgeous portfolio redesign. Check out the archive of her previous designs, too. They're remarkable.

published 05 December 2018

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 04 December 2018 · 3 responses

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 03 December 2018

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 29 November 2018 · 5 responses

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 07 November 2018 · 1 response

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 02 November 2018 · 5 responses

Piano Genie

Piano Genie, an intelligent controller that maps 8-button input to a full 88-key piano in real time, is in some ways reminiscent of video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero that are accessible to novice musicians, with the…

published 17 October 2018

Am I a Real Developer?

Ever wonder if you're a real developer? Maybe you used a tool before or wrote code that wasn't real code. Take the quiz and find out.

published 15 October 2018

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.

published 15 October 2018 · 9 responses

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 https://nyer.audio

published 09 October 2018 · 2 responses

Generative Artistry

These are the coolest instructional demos I've ever seen. It's just such a pleasure to watch how Tim Holman steps through each artistic challenge in a beautiful way.

published 09 October 2018

Happy Thanksgiving! 🍁

published 08 October 2018 · 2 responses

Been waiting a while for this, and boy, does it ever deliver. https://open.spotify.com/album/2MdTsQBOs71AZuqETMyLY2

published 04 October 2018

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 04 October 2018

If this makes it onto Mastodon 👋, it means my Micropub endpoint is syndicating correctly!

published 01 October 2018

On its own: 5/5. In the forest: 6/5.

published 01 October 2018 · 5 responses

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 01 October 2018 · 4 responses

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 13 September 2018 · 13 responses

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 08 September 2018 · 12 responses

Mariano Pascual’s Interactive Portfolio

I always wanted to create a website UI like this; only, Mariano's done it 10× better than I ever dreamed of. Such a delightful experience.

published 09 August 2018

Devhints — TL;DR for developer documentation

A ridiculous collection of web development cheatsheets

published 01 August 2018

Today at #hwclondon I’ll be attempting to enable my Micropub endpoint to accept JSON #indieweb

published 25 July 2018 · 1 response

So You Think You’ve Built a Good Infinite Scroll

Adrian hits the nail on the head with this checklist for implementing infinite scroll.

published 13 July 2018

Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦 Have a good one eh

published 01 July 2018 · 6 responses

Rolling my own Micropub server is proving immensely difficult. Way out of my depth. Feels good to learn, albeit slowly, though.

published 21 June 2018 · 1 response

Drinking coffee out of a sub-standard mug today because some mug has taken my mug!

published 19 June 2018 · 7 responses

Firecracker Sauce

A recipe by Kitchen Sanctuary

published 02 June 2018

Added @adactio’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 15 May 2018

btn elem evt lnk tgl

published 17 April 2018

At my first Homebrew Website Club meetup! Planning how to roll my own micropub endpoint... #hwclondon #indieweb

published 24 January 2018 · 6 responses

2017 (12)

Crispy Fried Noodles

published 25 November 2017 · 1 response

Whoa. This ’97 beat tape from Kanye is incredible.

published 19 November 2017

Fresh keys.

published 10 November 2017

Crossing Guards

Throttle back on your scroll events and watch out for the IntersectionObserver!

published 09 November 2017 · 3 responses

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 03 November 2017

Game night! 😊

published 29 October 2017

Every rose has its thorn. @CodePen just crashed on me for the first time in over a year. Still using it everyday though. :)

published 25 October 2017 · 1 response

This is my first Note that I'm posting and syndicating automatically!

published 18 October 2017

Anyone using IntersectionObserver seen intersectionRatio>1? I’ve been rounding this attribute, toFixed(n), to help keep things clean.

published 15 October 2017

"Why don't you smile more?" Thanks for asking!

published 22 September 2017

Unique Pairs in Sass

In creating a from-scratch grid for a redevelopment project, I was using Sass 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 16 June 2017 · 2 responses

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 15 June 2017 · 1 response

2016 (15)

NYER

The classic rap air horn. That's all.

published 14 November 2016

Atom Multiline Select

An Atom Editor package to support multiline selection which I forked and modified to mimic Sublime Text's multiline selection technique.

published 22 July 2016

Theremin

Play your own musical synth with delay, feedback, and scuzz.

published 06 May 2016

IE9 :before font-size bug

Seems there's a bug in Internet Explorer 9 wherein pseudo content (:before and :after content) doesn't get parsed properly in the DOM, so instead of declarations like font-size being applied only once despite multiple occurrences of the rule, but is…

published 05 May 2016

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 29 April 2016

HTML Rube Goldberg

A mesmerising Rube Goldberg machine made with HTML form elements and their form element-specific attributes and states, like checked, :focus, and value.

published 29 April 2016

Supporting Middle-Out in CSS

My first ever talk, given at London Web Standards.

published 18 April 2016 · 1 response

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 23 March 2016

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 18 March 2016

Responsive Pixel Art

This is an incredible display of creativity and logic on the web. The effort that has gone into this is unbelievable.

published 09 March 2016

Editing your last embarrassment

In other words Quick editing your last sent texts

published 27 February 2016

Regex Golf

Test your regex skills. So much fun. Brainmelting, but fun.

published 23 January 2016

Styling SVG use Content with CSS

Little late on this one, but gold dust nonetheless. SVG Wizard, Sara Soueidan, discusses in-depth how to style SVG's element and how to overcome the challenges in doing so.

published 21 January 2016

ServiceWorker Cookbook

The Service Worker Cookbook is a collection of working, practical examples of using service workers in modern web apps.

published 08 January 2016

Polyfill Service

The polyfill service selectively bundles browser polyfills based on the User-Agent header supplied in a request, with the intention of allowing JavaScript and CSS developers to use modern standards in legacy user agents that do not natively support the standard.…

published 05 January 2016

2015 (4)

2014 (3)

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.

published 22 September 2014

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 27 August 2014

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 09 February 2014 · 2 responses

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