WordPress 5.8 shipped a few weeks ago. Release notes should be an exciting read but these filled me with dread. The Gutenberg editor has been a constant thorn in my side. I vented a rather negative tweet that I’ve since deleted. I hope this blog post offers more reasoned criticism to explain my frustrations with […]
The Netlify build environment is a Docker image with preinstalled packages like Node and Python. For sensible reasons the packages are rather “stable”, or “outdated”, depending on your sensibilities. Environment variables like NODE_VERSION=16.5 are used to update dependencies if you live on the edge. If you live too far on the edge, Netlify doesn’t provide enough. […]
Back in 2015 I built the front-end for Parts Giant. Following a successful five years of e-commerce, Parts Giant handed me a similar brief with a refreshed design. Five years is a long time on the web. This was an opportunity to showcase that evolution and deliver a thoroughly modern front-end component library building on […]
Eight years ago I wrote a (then) modern guide to implementing off-canvas navigation for Smashing Magazine. My original demo is still online (links in the article are broken). It’s rather quaint by today’s standards. Back in 2013 responsive design was not yet fully accepted as the norm. Unthinkable! JavaScript was needed to fix the nav […]
Did you know those behemothic JavaScript date libraries are basically obsolete? A few weeks ago I learnt how to use the Internationalization API for natural alphanumeric sorting. This week I’ve been using the DateTimeFormat and RelativeTimeFormat APIs. Like all native APIs they’re a little verbose and unintuitive, but also extremely powerful. Browser support has caught up […]
I’m building a progressive web app (PWA, aka website) to play audiobooks. It’s a side project that is teaching me a lot. The seemingly simple features are some of the hardest to implement. Natural alphanumeric sorting is one problem that took me half a day to solve. It’s reminiscent of an issue I debugged in […]
I use both GitHub Pages and Netlify for static web hosting. GitHub Pages are great for project documentation. Netlify allows more control. Cloudflare Pages is a new contender to the game offering a similar build and deploy process. I have a new side project in the works. A good opportunity to try out Cloudflare Pages. The […]
