Hello
My brain still decided this week is not the week to be focused on anything again. On the flip-side of me feeling pretty unproductive with all the stuff that I should have been working on, I was finally making some proper progress on a little bit of a redesign for this very site here, which is nice. Sometimes it’s good to just go with the flow and see where inspiration takes you, I guess. Even if it wasn’t what you set out to do.
Anyway, here’s some interesting links.
Frontend Development
📐 Responsive Design in 2023 and beyond
Ahmad Shadeed compiled a lot of things modern CSS can do in this huge post about responsive design in 2023. He illustrates very well why we don’t really need a lot of the media-queries anymore, and how the same layouts can be built (often even better) without them and with modern features like flexbox, clamp() or container queries instead.
Ahmad Shadeed – The Guide To Responsive Design In 2023 and Beyond
📚 Data-informed flex-grow for illustration purposes
I love all those bookshelf sites and hope I soon find some time to include something on here as well. In this post, Hidde demonstrates how he uses flex-grow to display the page-count of books. Pretty cool.
Hidde de Vries – Data-informed flex-grow for illustration purposes
👍 Don’t mess with browsers capabilities
I’ve read this article from 2019 on why we shouldn’t mess with the defaults of browsers and it made me think of the article I’ve linked to last week. It was only until the very end of the article, that I realized it was written by Eric Bailey as well. I never heard the term “external consistency” before, which refers to things (like browser scrollbars or scroll-behaviour) that users know and therefore shouldn’t be changed, if you want the experience to be consistent.
A List Apart – Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need
🔧 Local Google Fonts
Our friends at required built a little helper tool to extract Google Fonts to self host them. If you include a set of UTF Characters that you will use on your site, the tool will download and create a subset of this font, which will further minimize the footprint of your font files. Dominik Schilling wrote about what it does and why they built it. Good stuff.
WordPress
🤩 What’s new for developers? (February 2023)
A comprehensive guide about all the things coming to WordPress soon.
WordPress.org – What’s new for developers? (February 2023)
Other
🙏 Productive Procrastination
Jim Nielsen about how to view procrastination as something positive. Maybe procrastination is not as bad as we think it is and we should embrace it for what it is: Motivation to do something else instead. Oh how perfectly this article sums up my last two weeks.
Jim Nielsen – Productive Procrastination
🤖 Be wrong in an interesting way
Jeremy Keith wrote about a discussion they had at Clearleft about “AI” and about whether their/our jobs will soon be gone. The way they see it goes very much in the same direction of what I told a friend of mine who’s a street artist. While he was mostly afraid that it makes his work obsolete, I look at tools like Midjourney and see how all the hours are gone that he sits on Google Image Search for inspiration, I see 500 rough drafts of an idea quickly generated, adjusted and experimented with and then he, the artist, doing the interesting work. And all of that much faster. I couldn’t phrase it better than Terence Eden when he wrote:
Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.
Terence Eden
Jeremy Keith – You can call me AI
Open Source and self-hosted Uptime Monitoring Tool
I heard about this self-hosted uptime monitoring tool before, but had another look this week and it sounds like a nice alternative to the services we were using before. Looks nice and comes with public dashboards and status pages and can do notifications on all kinds of services including Slack and Email – the ones we would possibly use most. Maybe I should install it and give it a go.
Have a nice weekend 😎