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 13 January 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 05 December 2021 note
Deep Dive into Colour How to make powerful use of CSS Variables, colour spaces, and the cascade using Bowhead. published 28 November 2021 · 2 responses to Deep Dive into Colour article
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. published 23 November 2020 · 12 responses to Time to Cache Up article
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 · updated 29 November 2021 · 30 responses to Sassy Lobotomised Owl article
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 to The Flip-Flop Technique article
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 · updated 26 June 2019 · 6 responses to Reply Targets article
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 note
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 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. published 04 March 2019 · updated 21 October 2021 · 5 responses to Sparkline Sound-Off article
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 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 11 December 2018 · 3 responses 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 06 December 2018 · 5 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 04 December 2018 · 3 responses to 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 29 November 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 07 November 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 02 November 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. published 15 October 2018 · updated 06 May 2021 · 9 responses to Variables for Both article
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 01 October 2018 · 4 responses to Living Deliberately 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 08 September 2018 · 12 responses to note
Crossing Guards Throttle back on your scroll events and watch out for the IntersectionObserver! published 09 November 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 03 November 2017 article
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 · 1 response to Unique Pairs in Sass 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 15 June 2017 · 1 response to Remapping Ranges in Sass 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 29 April 2016 article
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 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 18 March 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 08 June 2015 article
Theming Pinboard I recently decided I would embark on the task of theming Pinboard. Here's how I did it. published 12 March 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. published 22 September 2014 · updated 25 January 2016 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 27 August 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 09 February 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. published 29 October 2013 · updated 06 June 2015 article
Viewport Woes I've been around the block and seen just about every combination 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 29 August 2013 article
Persistent Shadows How easy is it to keep a shadow's direction consistent whilst rotating an element? published 18 June 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 16 June 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 15 June 2013 article
