Reading List #36

Hi

It’s only one week left until our trip to Thailand with the whole family. Things are prepared and I feel pretty ready and even quite relaxed, which is a bit unexpected given the fact that traveling with kids always comes with its challenges and adventures. Also, as if life decided to not make it too easy for us, the labor union of Swiss’ pilots are threatening to strike, starting exactly the day of our flight, if they cannot find an agreement this weekend. Fingers are crossed 🀞

Apart from work, I was playing around with Stable Diffusion and some other AI-tools to generate images and was quite impressed with what’s possible already. Might write a blogpost about it, if I find some time.

Now, on to some of the things I found read-worthy during the last days.

Frontend Development

πŸ”₯ Progressive Enhancement FTW

Jenna Smith talks about how progressive enhancement was just the norm, back when browsers sucked. How and why this slowly changed. And why it is – or should still be – important to everything we build on the web today.

I really like to point out this quote about how a JS solution can worsen an experience for everyone, including the visitors with JavaScript:

More recently, I used JavaScript to attach an src attribute to an image which meant that the 99% had to wait the extra time it takes for the JavaScript to load before their browser even began to download the image. The 1% would never see an image! This is something HTML has supported since the dawn of time and I still managed to worsen the experience for the 99%.

So I realised, progressive enhancement isn’t only about supporting that 1%. It’s about testing your app without JavaScript to ensure 100% of your users have a more performant, usable, available, and resilient experience.

Jenna Smith – Progressive Enhancement for a more resilient Web

Amen!

Jenna Smith – Progressively enhance for a more resilient web

πŸ§žβ€β™‚οΈ Myths about vanilla JavaScript

Chris Ferdinandi busting some myths about vanilla JavaScript. I certainly heard most of them before, and couldn’t agree more with him.

GoMakeThings – Myths about vanilla JavaScript

πŸͺΆ Fontshare

Another useful font resource, with fonts that are free for commercial and personal use. Check out the pairs section, to find fonts that work together nicely.

Fontshare

🏹 Input Slingshot Firework

This slingshot-style input firework made me smile.

Codepen – Fireworks of inputs


WordPress

πŸ€— Theme Update Headers in WordPress 6.1

This is a nice addition for custom themes. Previously, if you had a theme with a slug that matched another theme within the official wordpress.org repository, it would show updates to it and then possibly overwrite your installed theme. With the upcoming 6.1 release, you can define a Theme Update URI Header in your themes’ style.css to prevent this from happening – or even introduce your own update procedures, as I understand it. It works exactly the same way as the same header for plugins, which was introduced in WordPress 5.8 a while back. Good news.

make.wordpress.org – Introducing β€œUpdate URI” theme header in WordPress 6.1

πŸ”₯ WordPress 6.1 Field Guide

WordPress 6.1, which is scheduled to come out November 1st, is packed with very interesting features and enhancements. The field guide gives a great overview of what’s coming.

make.wordpress.org – WordPress 6.1 Field Guide

πŸ€“ WordPress.org Support Ressources

I just stumbled upon this github repo with some great ressources for WordPress.org Supporters. It features a collection of questions, bugs and changes that came up frequently, sorted by version. Also, there are some userscripts (didn’t even know that this is possible) which you can install(?) on WordPress.org support forums to give you a set of often used answers. Definitely something to check out, if you do support on WP.org.

Github.com – wporg-support


SEO

πŸ”Ž Google Search Essentials

Google updated their guide on search essentials (formerly Google Webmaster Guidelines). If you want to learn more about SEO basics, this is a good start.

Google Search Central – Search Essentials


Other / Random

These two videos of Tatiana Erukhimova, a russian-american physics and science teacher, landed in twitter feed and I really liked her hands-on style.

Made me wonder if my school career would have looked different if I would have had a single teacher with her enthusiasm.

Video of Tatiana Erukhimova demonstrating the effect of liquid nitrogen on boiling water

Another video of her demonstrating gyroscopic forces


✌️ Have a good week everyone!

Made with ❀️ in Switzerland