Today’s Readings

Posted on May 17, 2013 by aarontgrogg

Planning ahead, maybe, but just to be safe, Don’t Be A Glasshole…

Brilliant, tiny, nearly-hidden use of video on the HandHeld conference website… Scroll down and hover over a presenter’s pic/title/description… I mean, this was one of the coolest things about Harry Potter, right??

I’m sure everyone reading this makes nothing but fully-accessible sites, but these types of lists are always worth a quick scan, I think. Also handy is the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool listed in #10.

Someone in the U.S. Congress is finally proposing an a la carte television cable bill; is it already too late?

Fancy a little tech humor?

Unbelievable submarine cable map!! But wait, there are NO cables connected to Antarctica? How do the all the penguins get their cat videos??

Are CDNs as useful as we’re all led to believe? Maybe not…

Awesome hover/rollover technique! With a slight rebuttal from , that also highlights a great CSS-only alternative from .

Google just announced their App Engine for PHP, which offers “scalable, secure and reliable” server space. Intriguing, made much more so by the fact that they demoed a WordPress site hosted there… Hmmm…

And speaking of WordPress, if you use something that’s free and open-source, why not see if you can help out in some way? WordPress is always looking for contributors!

Always thinking about performance? Give Google Chrome’s PageSpeed Insight Extension a go. YouTube demo, and slides.

Nice collection of responsive & retina image options. In other words, how to deal with image today, as opposed to five years ago…

Wow, everything you NEVER wanted to know about regular expressions… :-)

Damn you Google, will you please stop making the rest of us look bad?!?!?!

A fantastic, super lengthy, article on building a responsive site, starting with server-side detection and code selection, right through dealing with images, planning from feature phones right up through TVs…

A jQuery-based method for avoiding downloading carousel images until they’re requested. I’d recommend fetching the “next” and “previous” images instead of the one actually being requested, to avoid latency lag, but an interesting method.

Wow, print-screen has always been a little awkward, made more so by my insistence on using a Mac keyboard even on my PC (which means no PrntScr button!), and low-and-behold, here comes LightShot, which lets you (somewhat*) easily draw a rectangle around whatever you want to grab, then optionally upload it to their editing tool, and do with it what you want…

If you live and breath HTML5 video, then The State Of HTML5 Video is for you! Enjoy!!

Coming in 2014, billions and billions of prayers answered! Cannot wait!

“That elephant? We call him Rambo…” Kharma can be a real bitch…

Packery is an odd-sounding name, but simply bad-ass tech…

“No, no, no, we’re trying to help the trees, see????” #fucktards

And finally, the ridiculous animation that we all loved to hate, is back…

Happy reading,
Atg

Update to Modernizr-Server and -Client

Posted on May 14, 2013 by aarontgrogg

Not long ago I forked and made a few modifications to James Pearce’s Modernizr Server repo on GitHub.

And now I’ve finally had the time to do a little more fine-tuning:
https://github.com/aarontgrogg/modernizr-server

My most recent enhancements include:

  1. adding a few tests to make sure the Modernizr tests can run successfully before the process starts,
  2. retaining the classes in the client browser so the tests don’t have to be run again, and
  3. using localStorage to store the Modernizr test results, in order to reduce the cookie overhead (while still falling-back to cookies if necessary).

There is still more work that I’d like to do, documented in the README file, but it is a little more progress.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Atg

Today’s Readings

Posted on May 13, 2013 by aarontgrogg

Let’s start this one out right: David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. Including playing guitar, in space…

Whether or not you like the upcoming upgrades to JavaScript (via ECMAScript 6), they are coming, and there are some great use-cases, and in fact, you can use some of the new features right now!

And with all that cool, new stuff you can do with JS in mind, let’s look at a few good bits to not do with jQuery.

I’m reminded again of the “someday” feature datalist, which offers several benefits over a traditional input or select all wrapped into one, but still lacks support in a couple large arenas. That said, you can always add a polyfill for those devices that lack native support.

Another easy one to forget about is the CSS pseudo-selector :empty, which has rather good support (except for IE<9), even in mobile!

It would be so great if we could simply test a device’s online/offline status. But we can’t. And the first real issue is determining exactly what online/offline means. So have a look at this (soon-to-be) 3-part series on the subject. Thoroughly written.

Okay, we all know this isn’t the kind of thing we should be doing with our CSS, but it’s so fun to look at!

Initially this article about WordPress Conditional Tags didn’t provide anything new to me, but near the end, where the author mentions a plugin that works with the GUI Admin page for Widgets caught my eye… Slick approach, and great for non-coders!

And speaking of WordPress, the soon-to-be-released version 3.6 will now offer native audio/video support, which means WP handles embedding or uploading your assets, managing the shortcode, and providing the best viewing option for your users, based on their device (thanks to the included MediaElement.js library), and no need to embed Vimeo or YouTube embed code…

expands on the idea of a performance budget for your sites by adding responsive images (specifically, each image’s file size) into that equation.

A rather thorough documentation (charted in a lovely spreadsheet, no less) for the various, and varying, styleguides, boilerplates and libraries out there.

From comes yet another data-dig, this time exploring the difference in bytes that are served via responsive sites across different device sizes. While we may be designing for different screen sizes, we’re clearly not developing for them…

Over the years I’ve spent my fair share of time with the Google Maps API, so I’m always a sucker for someone doing something interesting with it. And making a responsive, Retina-friendly, custom list/marker version definitely caught my eye. Great write-up!

And speaking of Retina, how about a little PhotoShop Action to help convert your layers into Retina-friendly images?

Violin is so much fun to play with! Now, if I can only figure out what it actually means… :-) Oh, and svg, you so sexy…

And finally, bureaucracy is such a hoot!

Happy reading,
Atg

Today’s Readings

Posted on May 8, 2013 by aarontgrogg

For all my desingy peeps out there, comes Vitamin T, “The Talent Agency for Digital Creatives.”

Sticking with design (sort of) for a few more seconds, the venerable CSS Zen Garden has turned 10 years old. I know it was certainly an eye-widening experience for me to discover just how powerful CSS could be. I wonder what kind of amazing layouts and tricks such a site would generate today, with responsive being the tech du jour…

And speaking of responsive sites, in case you, or someone you love, hasn’t hopped in the pool yet, it is time, and SitePoint is here to help with a multi-part series: Build a Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Website From Scratch.

I typically hate articles about “some day you’ll be able to do this” features, because, well, they used to piss me off, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to use it for a loooonnngggg time… But now-days, with browser versions iterating so quickly, things like what Adobe is doing with page layout could be in our grasp soon… Inspiring…

Like it? Git it.

And speaking of Adobe awesomeness… Wow.

Okay, just one more on the Adobe rant…

Okay, seriously, the last one…

I can’t imagine someone traveling without a cell phone but somehow having access to a computer, but Friend Dailer still seems like a cool, niche, technology.

A mostly-over-the-top collection of CSS transitions, but a couple are cool looking, and could even be useable…

Now these transitions are a little more practical…

And these… are not.

And this doesn’t look all that useful either, but pretty cool-looking tech, nonetheless…

If you share Dropbox folders with anyone (clients, friends, co-workers) then you have encountered a folder that you wish was named something different, but was created, and named, by someone else. I’ve always assumed renaming it would bust the connection, but apparently not!

Cautiously optimistic: A self-hosted RSS reader… Could… Be… Good…

Have you seen the rapidly-expanding Chrome DevTools docs? Think I’ll get my next Bachelor’s Degree on that… :-) Impressive!

Bike even more safely, with a nice, bright LED brake light!

Anyone tried Ghostlab yet?

Apps are so cute…

Got Pong? Fun!

And finally, the Swiss Army Knife certainly still has its place in life, but the USB Utility Charge Tool seems nearly as useful in today’s world…

Happy reading,
Atg

Today’s Readings

Posted on May 6, 2013 by aarontgrogg

Ho, you geffum, eh Hawai’i? Way to show the aloha spirit for all of your visitors!! Especially love the Day/Night option in Settings… :-)

The top eCommerce sites in the world are 22% slower than they were last year. Yikes!

Top Alexa Sites Averaging 9.5 Seconds Page Load Time… What is going out there, web devs???

And speaking of fatty-bloatnedness, Pitchfork is supposed to have some really impressive parallax scrolling, but as it sat there, downloading more and more and more, I closed it. Maybe you have more patience than I.

The only thing more despicable than some U.S. farming practices is their blatant legal attempts to hide those practices from their customers… If you have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t bother you if people film it, right??

Wow, this must literally be everything there is to know about CSS Selectors…

When you feel like you need to get away from it all and unplug, now you can. And still stay plugged in… Do you prefer fire or water?

A pretty cool responsive, open-source lightbox plugin. Shame they didn’t incorporate touch swipe events…

In-depth article about the good, bad, and ugly or infinite scroll. Other than the good point about not being able to ever reach Facebook’s footer, the only real issue I have with it is when sites don’t set markers for click/Back actions, and you have to re-scroll to get back to where you were…

I’ve always loved the concept of all-CSS modals. I think the concept and implementation is really sweet. Used to be a nightmare to cover IE6/7, which this one does not, but then, does anyone any more?

Lots of nay-sayers in the comments, mostly regarding inconsistent OS font rendering or internationalization, but I still think the ligature-approach is a smooth way to graphically replace text.

And finally, for any of you that are old enough to have experienced the 80s, National Geographic has a new video ad that is sure to take you back…

Happy reading,
Atg