Hello 👋
Last week, we made some solid progress on two client projects. One of them is the first fully block-based theme we’ll ship for a client, which I’m very much looking forward to and learned a ton working on it. And the other is a pretty sophisticated form for a Healthtech startup in Germany with loads of API-stuff going on in the back. Both completely different, but both very interesting.
I do look forward when both are shipped though, as we have plenty of stuff to be done for picu at the moment, which I very much look forward to get back into!
Frontend Development
📜 Scroll Driven Text Highlight Animation
Chris Coyier shows how to animate a text-highlight using a <mark> element and some scroll-driven animation magic. Unfortunately this is still not supported in Safari, but other than that it’s pretty cool, has good support and can be used as a progressive enhancement.
Frontend Masters – Highlight Text When a User Scrolls Down to That Piece of Text
WordPress
📦 Starter patterns for your Theme
If you took a look into Twenty Twenty Four, you possibly noticed those nice “Choose a pattern” modals that open when you create a new page. Justin Tadlock demonstrates how you can add patterns to show up in there for different post types as well as in the Site Editors templates. Pretty cool.
WP.org – Adding starter patterns to your WordPress themes
🎁 Building a dynamic Block with a little help of AI
Rich Tabor shows how to use the create-block tool and some help of AI to build a dynamic block to display a link to a random post on your site. The AI-part is really only used to create the random link in PHP which is fairly simple. It’s still a cool tutorial to show how “easy” it is became to build a custom block.
Rich Tabor – Build blocks with AI
🤯 Playground supports WP-CLI now
The progress on WordPress playground is amazing. Now you can use WP-CLI commands inside a WP playground in running in your browser. Fun times.
Adam Zielinski – WP-CLI in playground
Other
❤️ Interacting with each other is the whole point
Jim Nielsen on some thoughts by Paul Ford about why AI will not replace Humans and why that cannot be the goal. “Interacting with each other is the whole point.” – Can’t argue with that.
Jim Nielsen – It’s Humans All the Way Down
🤯 Fungus in Space
Did you know that there are types of fungi that traveled to space (accidentally at first, but then also on purpose) and not only did they survive the harsh conditions up there (radiation, lots of radiation), but they are now also studied to be used to protect other organisms (like ourselves) from extreme radiation. I love nerdy stories like these.
@annethegnome – FUNGUS IN SPACE!!!
✌️ Have a great week!