Hey there
We are heads down into a client project as well as releases for both picu & picu Pro, which is why I keep finding myself writing these lists randomly throughout the week and not strictly on Friday anymore. But who cares, I just hit publish as soon as I feel there’s enough to share.
Frontend Development
✌️ Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship
To be fair, I was never forced to work on a project using Tailwind and only played around with it for a bit, and disliked it, so I might be wrong and it is actually better in a real project. This article by Jeff Sandberg resonated with me a lot, though, and he puts into words what I think is wrong with Tailwind – and similar approaches – much better than I could.
Jeff Sandberg – Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship
😎 Matthias Ott on ditching WOFF files for your Webfonts
As Matthias writes in this post, if you work on the web it is a good idea to reevaluate how you do things from time to time. He argues that with todays support for WOFF2, we don’t need to provide WOFF files anymore when loading your Webfonts, which makes a lot of sense.
Matthias Ott – WOFF Has Left the Building
🔧 CSS Tools
Michelle Barker shared some of her favorite tools. Great list.
CSS { In Real Life } – CSS Tools
😵 Why Email Development (still) sucks
It’s a stretch to even call coding HTML Emails “Frontend Development” as nearly nothing works and web standards are pretty much non existent in emails. Here, Hristiyan collect a lot of the things that are complete bongers with email development and also some ideas on how to help overcome them.
Hristiyan Dodov – Why Does Email Development Have to Suck?
🥸 Privacy and Data Collection in Google Fonts
Google released this article about privacy and data collection if you are using Google Fonts directly on your website. While there are some things in there that are certainly true (the need to update font files, if you self-host Google fonts, for example), I found the most interesting part that there was not a clear denial of them storing IP addresses of the websites visitors. The part about IPs is actually pretty carefully phrased to say something without saying anything at all, which can only mean they do store those IP addresses. Clearly written by lawyers and PR people and another good reason to self-host those fonts wherever possible.
Google Fonts – Privacy and Data Collection
WordPress
There was a lot going on in WordPress-land last week. One of them being a Code of Conduct violation report filed against Matt Mullenweg. I still don’t really understand what made him feel the way he felt, but it certainly was important enough for him to risk some of his (and WordPress’) reputation. I certainly haven’t read all of what happened, nor do I have any inside knowledge, but from the tweets I have read I think it was a bit of an overreaction and could have been avoided, to say the least.
👏 What’s new for developers? (August & September 2023)
Finally took some time to skip through those two posts, introducing what’s new in WordPress in August and September.
What’s new for developers? (August 2023)
What’s new for developers? (September 2023)
👷 WordPress development mode
WordPress 6.3 introduced a new constant “WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE” which can be used to indicate that you are developing a theme, plugin or both. Felix Arntz explains the differences between the existing environment types, debug modes and the new new development mode and shows how to configure it.
UPDATE: Bego Maria Grande mentioned, that by using the WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE, the settings of the site-editor won’t get stored as transients, which can cause problems if you transfer sites from development/staging to production. Makes sense!
Configuring development mode in 6.3
Other
🪄 AI-Assisted Video Translations
This looks like pure magic. Translates videos from one language to another, including changing mouth movements to fit the new language perfectly.
Kottke – AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements
✌️ BlockFace
What a nice idea. An open-source type stamp kit, including instructions on how to build one for yourself.
Colossal – In an Open-Source Stamp Kit, ‘BlockFace’ Gets Tactile With Type
Bye ✌️