Useful technology, techniques and stories from modern web development and design
Every entry filed under the February 2017 dateline, newest first.
The strongest campaigns ask the reader to do one thing. A message that offers a download, a sale, an event and a survey at once splits attention four ways and usually achieves none of them.
Filed under: Email Marketing, Tips · Permalink
Git's own documentation is thorough and, at the moment you need it, almost entirely unhelpful. It is organised around commands rather than around the situations people find themselves in, so a developer who has just committed to the wrong branch has to already know which command they are looking for.
Filed under: Git, Showcase, Web Development · Permalink
Editing files directly on a live server is fast until the moment it is catastrophic. A local environment means every change is tested somewhere private first, and a mistake costs a page refresh rather than a public outage.
Filed under: Tutorials, Web Development · Permalink
A mixin is a named block of declarations you can include wherever you need them, optionally with arguments. The value is not that it saves typing, but that it puts one decision in one place: change the mixin and every element using it changes with it.
Filed under: CSS, SCSS, Showcase, Web Development · Tagged awesome, codepen, creative, css, examples, scss · Permalink
Install a valid certificate covering every hostname the site actually answers on, including the www variant if it resolves. A certificate that covers the apex but not the subdomain produces a warning that is more alarming to visitors than no encryption at all.
Filed under: Security, Tips, Tutorials, Web Development · Permalink
Every time a shell starts, it reads a profile file from your home directory. Adding a line to that file means the line runs on every new window. That is the whole mechanism, and it is also how most terminal customisation works.
Before scalable icon sets, interface symbols were images, and every size and colour variant was another file to produce and cache. Treating icons as glyphs meant a single dependency could serve a whole interface, scale cleanly, and be recoloured with the same CSS that styles text.
Filed under: CSS, Icons, Web Design, Web Development · Permalink
Plugin recommendations date badly, but the categories do not. A content site generally needs help in four places: search metadata, security hardening, caching and performance, and backups. Everything else is specific to the project.
Filed under: Resources, Security, SEO, Web Development, WordPress, WordPress Plugins · Permalink
WordPress decides which template file renders a request through a fixed hierarchy. Sketching which of those files a project actually needs, before writing any of them, prevents the common outcome of one enormous template full of conditional branches.
Filed under: Web Development, WordPress · Permalink
An animated gradient gives a page movement without loading a video or a sequence of images. The whole effect is colour values changing over time, which costs a fraction of what any media file would.
Filed under: CSS, Javascript, Resources, Web Development · Permalink
Web development runs on abbreviations, and most of them are learned by absorption rather than explanation. That works fine until a client, a designer or a new starter is in the room, at which point a shared vocabulary saves a great deal of circling.
Filed under: Web Development · Permalink
A search engine reading a page sees text. It can infer a great deal, but it is inferring. Structured data lets the page state directly that this string is a publication date, that one is an author, and the page as a whole describes an article.
Filed under: SEO, Tips, Web Development · Permalink
Collect enough desk photographs and the pattern is not a particular product but a particular restraint. The setups that hold up have one clear working surface, light coming from the side rather than behind the screen, and cables that have been dealt with rather than hidden in the frame.
Filed under: Inspiration, Workspaces · Permalink