Hi
After two years of successfully protecting ourselves, last week corona found its way to our family, at last. Which is why I missed publishing this list for the first time since November and wasn’t able to do much apart from lying around uselessly. But at least I only got mild symptoms with some crazy headaches, fatigue and a foggy brain for about a week.
This week I was mostly catching up with all the work I missed and trying to get back on track.
Here’s a few things I’ve read and found interesting in the last two weeks.
Frontend Development
🤩 Op-Art CSS Backgrounds (no SVG or images)
Ana Tudor shared some very nice Op-Art-Style backgrounds created using only CSS gradients and no SVG or images whatsoever. Love them.
Codepen – Pure CSS 1 div card backgrounds (no SVG, no images other than CSS gradients)
🤯 No, Ikea’s not changing your tab magically, but Safari is
After reading this tweet by Jesper van Haaren, it looked like Ikea did some magic with the tabs when you search for something. The tweet showed a short video where when you open multiple tabs of the same product, it clipped the name of the product and only showed exactly what you need (the dimensions) in the tab bar, to make it easy to switch between them. Pretty genius. But, as it turns out – this is not something Ikea did, but rather Safari itself, as Ricky Mondello pointed out.
📜 Scrollbars & Modern CSS
This article goes into the details of customizing scrollbars using modern CSS. Worth a read.
Mayank – Better scrolling through modern CSS
✨ Level up your Dev Tools Game
A great resource full of tips on what you can do inside browsers dev tools. RSS feed added to my list.
WordPress
Gutenberg Editor on Tumblr and DayOne Web Apps
It’s pretty interesting to see where Gutenberg is heading, with ambitions to becoming “the way” we create and edit content on the web, on and off WordPress. I never really thought about that all too much, but it kind of makes sense. Here are some demos Matt Mullenweg and Matías Ventura showed, of the first experiments of running Gutenberg on tumblr, as well as for the WebApp of DayOne.
WPTavern – Gutenberg Editor Now In Testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps
👍 In peace you may rest, yoda conditions
A new proposal to end the use of yoda conditions in WordPress core as well as in plugins and themes. Makes sense, considering that modern IDE’s and testing frameworks should take care of the reasons why yoda conditionals where used initially (not accidentally assign a value to a variable).
📦 Gutenberg on Pew Research Center
The new block editor got quite some criticism, since it was released. As with all major technological changes, it made people angry and and I certainly was skeptical myself. There are still some things that make me shake my head in terms of prioritization, and there are some bugs here and there, but I think thats normal for a project this size. All in all, I’m quite impressed with what you can do today and like the current direction.
Here’s Seth Rubenstein, the lead developer at Pew Research Center, showcasing some of the things they were able to do with the block editor. I think something that gets lost in all the strong opinions we all have, is what he writes in one of his tweets. And that is how much it empowers their editors to create things, which they couldn’t ever do before, at least not without a developer at hand.
EXACTLY! Before if a producer wanted to make a design change on a quiz well that required a dev’s time, now they can make all those choices (w input from the design team) themselves. This frees us up to build even more and gives us more time to maintain/improve functionality.
Seth Rubenstein. Pew Research Center
Seth Rubenstein on the use of Gutenberg on Pew Research Center
Other / Random
✈️ The 10 closest airports on a map
Found this gem of a demo in a tweet by William B. Davis. A map that shows the 10 closest airports from any point on the globe. Always amazing what you can do with just a little bit of data overlayed on a map.
Happy Weekend ✌️