Today’s Readings

From the Washington Post comes a pretty fun read about Internet security (yes, you read that right, “fun” and “Internet security”, in the same sentence!). Labeled as “part 1”, with interviews from the founding fathers and photos of some of the earliest equipment, it’s an interesting glimpse back at the the early thoughts, plans and processes. My two fave quotes are regarding the idea that the founders should have planned ahead and been able to avoid the security issues we face today:

  • : “You could argue with hindsight that we should have, but getting this thing to work at all was non-trivial.”
  • : “I believe that we don’t know how to solve these problems today, so the idea that we could have solved them 30, 40 years ago is silly.”

Translation of both statements: “Shut-up!” :-)

A couple cool accessibility bookmarklets:

  • tota11y wins the prize for cleverest name, and also collects any a11y concerns into a nice little floating panel for you.
  • HTML_CodeSniffer does basically the same thing, but seems to collect a lot more issues; it’s up to you to decide which collects a more useful list

A nice collection of flexbox resources, just for you!

Speaking of flexbox, starts off with a fantastic collection of CSS selectors to help solve complex problems, then demonstrates how easily some of the same problems can be resolved with a simple flexbox declaration

A jQuery plugin to make image maps (remember those?) responsive. Not sure why you would, but now you can. ;-)

Clever: Yet another “checkbox overload”, this time creating dismissible notification messages, using nothing but HTML and CSS.

I think I’ve posted about this before, but it’s so good, let’s do it again: The YouTube channel for Totally Tooling Tips is a collection of videos about developer tips. Gems in every vid, including DevTools and Sublime Text tips!

Need a new helmet? Well here’s one that looks like a real head! :-)

Parallax Scrolling: Engaging Or Annoying? Yes. Apparently it’s okay, as long you stop doing it shortly after you start doing it…

Great summary from on the Limitations on Styling Visited Links. Too bad, but I totally get it.

Coding in PHP is like grilling with propane

As someone that has authored a few WP plugins, hosts them on WP‘s Plugin Repository, but also on GitHub, I am drooling over the prospect of integrating the WordPress GitHub Plugin Updater! That is a lot of work saved…

Facebook recently reenacted a browser cache study that Yahoo! conducted back in 2007. So, before your parents were born. Amazingly, even though browsers have obviously improved a lot in the last 8 years, not much has changed when it comes to the bottom line (how many people get the cached content versus downloading it again). We can all thank ourselves for that, and our continued bloating of the Internet… So, keep on caching, it’s apparently the only way to keep up with the status quo… :-/

An impressive walk-through of a performance analysis on a real-live consumer website, Prep Sportswear. Rather bold of a company to allow this to be done live, so kudos to their dev team for being okay with it! See if there are any lessons you can learn from their work!

Speaking of a performance deep-dive, walks us through Performance Beyond the Page Load, things like how to avoid recalcs and repaints after the page has finished loading.

From the same conference, comes presentation The Wonderful World of SVG· Once you get past all the intro stuff of why SVGs rock, Chris gets into building your very own SVG icon system.

And finally, initially Google Maps’ Street View took us up and down nearly every street in the world. Then they took us under the seas. Now they’re taking us up El Capitan in Yosemite National Park… :-)

Happy reading,
Atg

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