Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS!
Change
I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my favorite programming l...
This piece by Cory Doctorow about blogging, which I read a few days ago, is exceptional. Why?
I already knew that blogging – and having a personal website in general – is a superpower.
I had heard before of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking essay “As We May Think” that direct...
Manuel asked:
Is there a good reason why we’re defining global custom properties on :root/html and not on body?”
It’s a great question: Everybody just...
Today, I started a new project with Kirby CMS. (No, it’s not my personal site. That one’s still brewing…)
Kirby is a lightweight, no-fuzz content management system (CMS) created by Bastian Allgeier, which works well for projects of any size. It is easy to install and amazin...
A while ago, I wrote about what you could include in a README file for a project. Based on this post and a few practical examples of READMEs, I created and published a template that I will use in my own projects going forward.
It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/...
Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed 100 posts about more or le...
Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes and that person is on va...
Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon:
https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869
What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of Leonie’s voice based on ...
After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set in in the southwestern p...
Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”.
I’ve noticed the same both in desig...
Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark...
As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em.
When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that might give authors much mo...
I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much like if you are reading a t...
CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but this one is definitely one ...
I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”.
Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are indeed reading my posts and...
Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order.
Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their...
A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online meetups as guests, or are s...
When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many clients ask for it and many ...
We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s block, but not only write...
I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI.
Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t be fully reliable. It might not work on short texts. Or, it might incorrectly but confidently label AI-written text as human-written. Also, people will sure as hell edit AI-written text so that it can’t be detected anymore.
Given that you have no idea how those algorithms really work, you might as well just use the classifier written by the same company that is currently gifting you the gift of AI for free. Sounds really reassuring, right?
Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… 😅
I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the MOTU M2.
The Røde Proca...
Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it.
One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it in your spare time, like...
We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon.
Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that t...
For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who ha...
Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for the excellent design qua...
205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of typefaces that is wonder...
For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being hugely popular designs. T...
Tobias Frere-Jones is one of the most accomplished type designers in the world. He worked at Font Bureau in Boston where he designed modern classics like Benton Sans or Interstate. He later returned to his hometown New York City and, at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, created tim...
Fontwerk was founded in 2019 by Ivo Gabrowitsch in Berlin. Building on his excellent network and years of experience as marketing director at FontShop and Monotype, Ivo has assembled a permanent team of great designers and font engineers that also regularly collaborates with...
