Hello
It’s been another week and the last one before we head to the mountains for a short vacation with the family. Thankfully, my brain finally decided that “focusing on things” can actually be quite helpful from time to time. I also got on my bicycle a bit more this week, which certainly helped as well.
After doing some rough design sketches last week for this site here, I spent some time this week to dabble with fullsite editing. Building a block theme feels pretty much completely different than the old way of building themes, and it was quite a steep learning curve to get into it. But overall, I would say there’s more I liked about it than not. Maybe I should write about all this in a separate post, we’ll see.
Frontend Development
😎 On attribute selectors in CSS
I’ve read about using attribute selectors, instead of classes, before. But I never really saw or understood the benefit of it. This article made it finally click for me and I can certainly see the value in styling some things this way. On one hand in terms of “forcing yourself to use or add the proper attributes to your code” as well as the part about “making impossible states impossible”, which is something I never thought about.
Elise Hein – The wasted potential of CSS attribute selectors
🎁 CSS Nesting is here
With variables/properties being available for a while, nesting in CSS is pretty much the one feature I would miss from SCSS the most. Looking forward to this being available right in CSS.
Webkit – Try out CSS Nesting today
👏 What to expect from your framework
Another great post about the current change in perception about frameworks, libraries and why boring server side rendered pages are often still the best solution. I agree with a lot of what Johan says here.
Johan Halse – What to expect from your framework
WordPress
📦 All about block themes
While I was learning more and more about block themes, this list here came in handy with a ton of resources about everything you need to know about them. Especially in a field like this, where things develop so fast that blogposts from two month ago can be outdated already, a current list like this is worth a lot.
WordPress.org – Block theme resources roundup
🔒 Locking down the block editor
Since we started using the block editor when it came out, customizing and/or locking things down for our clients was always important. But information about it was often hard to find with documentation being either nonexistent or outdated. Removing unused blocks and block-styles, deactivating the block pattern library, defining which controls a client has over the design or the new template and block-level locking features are all important parts for a good user experience in the editor. This page collects a lot of techniques to customize the editor experience.
WordPress.org – Curating the Editor Experience
Other
🔥 Why you should look at your product instead of data
Robin Rendle on why he thinks the only way to build a great product is by using it every day and why most “data” collected is bullshit. I couldn’t agree more and I’m not a big fan of surveys either. Usually they tell you exactly nothing you didn’t already knew, AND add a lot of noise on top to distract you.
Robin Rendle – Vibe driven development
😳 Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
You probably already heard about the beta-integration of Open AI’s chatbot into Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the interesting, funny, and sometimes scary responses this first implementation produced. Simon Willison did a great write up with lots of examples and some speculation about what could be happening behind the scenes.
Simon Willison – Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
🐥 Have a happy weekend