Hello again 👋
I hope you had a great week. It definitely was a productive week for me. And even though it’s not shipped yet, I made substantial progress on our new email system for picu! Looking forward to finally get this out!
Here’s what I’ve found interesting this week.
Frontend Development
📐 Aspect Ratio
The new-ish CSS property aspect-ratio
is a really handy addition and makes using aspect ratios really easy compared to the padding-hacks of the past. Michelle Barker explains it in detail with lots of examples. I’m looking forward to finally remove those ugly padding-hacks soon, in our own code for picu!
Michelle Barker – Aspect Ratio is Great
🎨 CSS Colors
There are several additions coming to CSS which make it possible to use colors that weren’t possible before. This post by Chris Coyier gives you a good overview of all the things coming. Interesting.
CSS-Tricks – A Whistle-Stop Tour of 4 New CSS Color Features
🐛 Make Free Stuff
This article by Max Böck resonated with me a lot. Make free stuff, put it out into the world. That was the internet before capitalism kicked in. And I liked it that way, as well. The example (Wordle) he used at the end, was probably not the best to make a point about free stuff, as it was sold (after he published the article) to the New York Times for a seven figure amount. Or, maybe it was the perfect example?
WordPress
🏠 White House
It’s really impressive, what 10up built for the White House Administrations website, using the WordPress Block Editor to provide a “What you see is what you get” editing experience. And all that was delivered in only 6 weeks.
Other / Random
🌍 The web is a miracle
Could the web happen again? Ben argues that it could probably not. Today, everything seems to be following the same startup-y path of least resistance biggest business value, as if this was a law of nature of sorts. I’m not 100% sure I fully agree, as there are tons of things, on and off the web, that are totally free. From various art movements to open source projects living somewhere in the shadows. But of course, they are not nearly as impactful as the web, so I guess it’s still a valid point.
On another, completely random note: if you haven’t seen this bit of David Bowie explaining his view of the web as an alien lifeform in 1999, go watch it. It still blows my mind every time.
Ben Werdmüller – The web is a miracle
👾 Not an NFT Artist
Another one from Michelle Barker, who saw her work – some open sourced code with generative art, and a tutorial explaining the process – taken by someone and sold as an NFT project. I totally get that you don’t necessarily like this very much, I wouldn’t. Even though as she said, there’s probably not much to do legally about this, it’s still pretty unethical. And the whole thing and her article summarizes my own view of the whole NFT/crypto scene very well.
Michelle Barker – Not an NFT artist
Have a nice weekend 🥂