Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties

A while ago, Geoff wrote an article about a cool hover effect. The effect relies on a combination of CSS pseudo-elements, transforms, and transitions. A lot of comments have shown that the same effect can be done using background properties. Geoff mentioned that was his initial thought and that’s what I was thinking as well. […]

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Nested Components in a Design System

When creating a component-based, front-end infrastructure, one of the biggest pain points I’ve personally encountered is making components that are both reusable and responsive when there are nested components within components. Take the following “call to action” (<CTA />) component, for example: On smaller devices we want it to look like this: This is simple […]

Writing Strong Front-end Test Element Locators

Automated front-end tests are awesome. We can write a test with code to visit a page — or load up just a single component — and have that test code click on things or type text like a user would, then make assertions about the state of the application after the interactions. This lets us […]

Adding Tailwind CSS to New and Existing WordPress Themes

In the 15 or so years since I started making WordPress websites, nothing has had more of an impact on my productivity — and my ability to enjoy front-end development — than adding Tailwind CSS to my workflow (and it isn’t close). When I began working with Tailwind, there was an up-to-date, first-party repository on […]

Making Mermaid Diagrams in Markdown

Mermaid diagrams and flowcharts have been gaining traction, especially with GitHub’s announcement that they are natively supported in Markdown. Let’s take a look at what they are, how to use them, and just as importantly: why. Just like you might want to embed your CodePen demo directly in your documentation source, having your diagrams and […]

Add a CSS Lens Flare to Photos for a Bright Touch

I’m a big fan of movies by J.J. Abrams. I enjoy their tight plots, quippy dialog, and of course: anamorphic lens flares. Filmmakers like Abrams use lens flare to add a dash of ‘homemade’ realism to their movies, a technique we can easily recreate in tools like Photoshop, then add to our sites as raster […]

Adding CDN Caching to a Vite Build

Content delivery networks, or CDNs, allow you to improve the delivery of your website’s static resources, most notably, with CDN caching. They do this by serving your content from edge locations, which are located all over the world. When a user browses to your site, and your site requests resources from the CDN, the CDN […]

Tricks to Cut Corners Using CSS Mask and Clip-Path Properties

We recently covered creating fancy borders with CSS mask properties, and now we are going to cut the corners with CSS mask and clip-path! A lot of techniques exist to cut different shapes from the corners of any element. In this article, we will consider modern techniques to create unique corner shapes while trying to […]

6 Useful Bookmarklets to Boost Web Development

A bookmarklet is a JavaScript-based bookmark that adds to a web browser. I’d like to show you some awesome web browser hacks to aid your web development workflow and how to convert those hacks into time-saving bookmarklets. Activating design mode Applying a background to everything Simulating events Setting cookies Toggling classes Color widget bookmark What […]

Write HTML, the HTML Way (Not the XHTML Way)

You may not use XHTML (anymore), but when you write HTML, you may be more influenced by XHTML than you think. You are very likely writing HTML, the XHTML way. What is the XHTML way of writing HTML, and what is the HTML way of writing HTML? Let’s have a look. HTML, XHTML, HTML In […]

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