Hood.ie: Offline first. Well worth reading more about…

Huh, in the same time period, a related Offline First article from SitePoint. Okay.

BitBalloon:

The ultimate HTML5 publishing engine for your sites and apps.

Sounds intriguing, I’ve been mostly happy with DreamHost since switching, but I still experience a terrible TTFB. Food for thought…

Then there’s also DreamFactory:

The DreamFactory Services Platform has everything you need for mobile enterprise application development. Sign up for free hosting or download the open source package.

Oh good, more food…

I’ve wanted a good reason to find Yeoman fascinating, but thus far had not; then YeoPress hit the scene…

Convert Word documents to Clean HTML

OMG, yes, please and thank you! This should be built directly into the Paste function in WordPress, when has anyone ever wanted that crap in their WordPress content???

Need to convert an image to a Data URI? I do quite often. Lately our team at work has been using LESS, so we do the task from there, but I still need to do this online some times. Just stumbled across Daturi, which does the job, but I was surprised it lacked drag-and-drop, which my normal converter, DataURL.net has. The choice is yours.

And speaking of auto-convert-type-thingies, a slew of sprite generators hit the scene years ago when the idea of image sprites hit the scene. IMO, none did the job well, just too many variables, and the outcome was always sloppy CSS. grunt-spritesmith is interesting, if for no other reason than it is Grunt-based. The algorithm setting in each task is the gold-mine, allowing you to plan and work out the sprite layout strategy to deal with the various sprite challenges. I also really like the CSS Class naming convention options.

Another article of enlightenment from PPK, this time regarding Orientationchange and resize events on mobile. And it’s as much fun as you might have expected… :-)

Is someone bucking for a gig on the Google Chrome team?? :-) Slick work!!

Ever click the Back button and see a page that reflects now-old data (like an un-updated Shopping Cart)? Me too. And likely so have your site users. Well no more, with this handy-dandy little HTML5 work-around…

The day when we can reliably start using CSS Regions on the web will be a great one, because then we can start creating shit like this! Yes, it will be awesome.

And as long as we’re talking about what it will be like to code in the year 2000, how about Media Queries Level 4?

Nice browser rendering primer fromPaul Lewis, presenting at Fronteers 2013. Very basic intro to what Chrome DevTools means when it says Paint, Layout, etc.

And speaking of Pauls from Google, learn more about High Performance Animations from the masters, Paul & Paul, starting with:

Modern browsers can animate four things really cheaply: position, scale, rotation and opacity. If you animate anything else, it’s at your own risk…

And speaking of Google and high performance, here are a couple fine-tuning recommendations for your mod_pagespeed and ngx_pagespeed.

Ever have to add CSS for rtl use-cases? Me neither, but I was really impressed with Booking.com‘s transition. As it turns out, if you’re using a CSS Preprocessor, it just might be easier than we expected…

Although this article is primarily about full-screen background <video>, there are a couple of useful tidbits that I think would apply to all instances of <video>, such as:

Important: the order of the video files is vital; Chrome currently has a bug in which it will not autoplay a .webm video if it comes after anything else.

and:

Older browsers will not recognize the video formats, but should still recognize the basic <video> tag (with the exception of IE8, detailed below). For those browsers we create a background-image for the element, using the same placeholder picture.

And the IE8 issue referenced is resolved with the well-known use of something like document.createElement('video'); and video { display: block; }.

Hilarious, I was just joking with a co-worker the other day about pedal-powered work stations, but this takes it to whole new levels! How many miles do you think you could pedal in an 8-hour work day??

Watch a solar eclipse shoot across the Earth’s surface, from space. Not as dramatic as I had hoped, but still pretty damned cool… :-)

The world of <flexbox> is still a bit of a mess, but here is a nice intro to want it can bring to your site. And once you have the basics, also from Dudley Storey, comes a little more advanced example of what you can do.

And finally, I’ve never been that big of a Thomas Kinkade fan, but that has all changed now…

Happy reading,
Atg

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