Writing

A more serious collection of 51 ideas and bits of prose, dating from 20132023.

2013 2023

2023 6 posts

2022 10 posts

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!

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.

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…

2021 2 posts

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…

2020 2 posts

2019 6 posts

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?

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/

LiquidBase60

I have started auto-generating ShortURLs 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.

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. 😌

2018 8 posts

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…

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

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.

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.

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…

2017 4 posts

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.

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.

2016 3 posts

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?

2015 2 posts

2014 3 posts

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.

2013 5 posts

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.

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!

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?