✌️ Hello
Putting together this reading list for the second time now “forced” me to look much more at my own website than I did in the months before, which made me recognize a lot of things I’d like to change or implement. One of those things was a dark mode, which I spent a few evenings experimenting with this week. Still a few quirks, which is why I haven’t released it yet, but it will be ready very soon.
Another idea I was playing and sketching around recently, is building a little “bookshelf” on here, somewhat similar to what David Bauer does. I already take notes and more or less have been tracking the books I read for for a few years, but most of that is on paper or hidden somewhere in a spreadsheet and I would love to get them on here.
Oh and this week, I finally received my long awaited early christmas present, a Keychron K3 keyboard, which I’m typing this on right now. Still getting used to it, but loving it so far.
But now, on to the articles I’ve been reading this week.
Frontend Development
👩🎨 A Guide To Modern CSS Colors With RGB, HSL, HWB, LAB And LCH
As someone with a background in photography, and color management in particular, I love the fact that the web will soon provide much more possibilities for colors in CSS. Many of the features Michelle Barker presents in this article are not ready for prime time yet, but some can already be used with proper fallbacks or behind browser flags for testing.
Smashing Magazine – A Guide To Modern CSS Colors by Michelle Barker
Bramus added relative color manipulations as the only thing he missed in her post.
Bram.us – Dynamic Color Manipulation with CSS Relative Colors
📺 Thinking on ways to solve COLOR SCHEMES
In this short Google Chrome Developers Video, they use custom properties together with some relative color manipulations and HSL colors to create different color schemes. Perfect companion to the article above.
YouTube – Thinking on ways to solve COLOR SCHEMES
☯️ The color-scheme CSS property and meta tag
Thomas Steiner shows what you can do, or even more important: What browsers can do for us, if we specify color-scheme meta-tags and CSS-properties. With the meta-tag, you can basically tell the browser what color scheme your site uses, before any CSS is loaded and parsed. And the CSS property allows an “element to indicate which color schemes it is comfortable being rendered with”. Sounds abstract at first, but is really powerful if you get the hang of it.
👍 Scott Vandehey on Modern CSS in a Nutshell
A lot of people find CSS hard to grasp. And it can be sometimes, which is one of the reasons, frameworks like Tailwind found a huge following, I guess. But as Scott Vandehey points out in this post, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. First: you don’t need to know everything about CSS! And second: learning just a few of the new(-ish) concepts he mentions will take you very far with modern CSS.
Cloudfour – Modern CSS in a Nutshell
WordPress
Introduction to theme.json Block Themes
Ellen of Elmastudio with a great introduction to Block based Themes and the theme.json settings file. I haven’t had enough time to really get into the upcoming full site editing and play around with block based themes, but I plan to change this, soon. This article is a solid introduction of the new concepts and ideas.
Elmastudio.de – Theme.json for WordPress Block Themes explained
🤓 You should never change GUIDs in WordPress. And how to do it, if you must
It’s highly discouraged to change GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifier) in WordPress. Brad Touesnard gives a nice overview about what GUIDs are, why they shouldn’t be changed and what steps you should be taking in the rare cases were you actually should change them. We recently moved from Migrate DB Pro to a solution with custom coded bash scripts for our own backups and migrations, but we usually only migrate from live/propduction to our local/staging and not the other way around. If you need to push data from a staging to a production site using the wp-cli, this is also possible, but make sure to add --skip-column=guid to your wp search-replace command to make sure GUIDs won’t change.
Delicious Brains – WordPress GUIDs: What They Are, and Why Change Them
✍️ WordPress Flow
What happens when WordPress loads? John Blackburn collected everything that happens under the hood in this gist. Would be interesting to know if everything is still fully up to date, as it’s from 2015, but it’s a good start.
Github Gist by John Blackbourn – WordPress Flow
👮♀️ Encute – Fluent Managament of Scripts and Styles
Mark Jaquith built a plugin to manage the scripts and styles you enqueue in WordPress. It lets you load scripts in the footer, defer a script, load it async, and more.
WordPress.org Plugins – Encute
✅ WPMetrics
If you develop plugins or themes on WordPress.org, there are not many stats you get. PluginRank, which was acquired recently, was the first SaaS-type service I’m aware of to give you some more insights and competitor analyses. But there seems to be another one – WPMetrics – which has been around for a few years now and looks promising as well. I just created a test account and added a few plugins to check it out over the next days.
Random
Beatles – Get Back
I haven’t seen the full documentary yet, but just saw this tweet with a short clip of it. In it, you see a young Paul McCartney jamming around randomly until he creates the iconic hit song “Get Back” pretty much out of thin air.
It’s like magic.
Looking forward to watch the whole series, even tough I don’t really like the “streams exclusively on Disney+” part.
Twitter – Get Back Jam Session
✌️ Thanks for reading. Have a happy weekend!