Blog (page 5)

Availability in July!

Looks like I’m free next month! Do you need anything built? I’m pretty good at all things front-end development. How can I help? Contact me! What have I been up to? I’ve been thinking a lot about static site generators and server side rendering. SSG and SSR. A lot of letters that result in HTML. When done right. I’ve been […]

2022 Things

Hello! I’m still around! Working hard with not a lot to share publicly. I’ve been pondering blog topics but nothing has piqued my interest. There’s plenty of exciting new web standards to explore but every time I enquire about “browser support” the new toys are snatched away! It’s not fair! Yeah, I guess I can support […]

Does WordPress Have a Gutenberg Problem?

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 […]

Deno Builds on Netlify

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 For sensible reasons the packages are rather “stable”, or “outdated”, depending on your sensibilities.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. […]

A New Component Library for Parts Giant

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 […]

The Final Off-Canvas Navigation?

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 […]

Relative Date Formatting in JavaScript

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 […]