Today’s Readings

By now you likely know what a waterfall chart is, but if not, here is not only a great primer, but also a great deep-dive into the bits and pieces of a waterfall chart; all of it required knowledge if you plan to debug performance.

And speaking of waterfall charts, here’s Paul Irish’s keynote from Fluent 2014, where he explains the Speed Index, how the HTTP process works, and how all that affects the lines on a waterfall chart… All in less than 25 seconds… Whew!

I like reading posts from a lot. His writing is just easy to read, but filled with good examples of good designs & development. Thus, I present his approach to creating a Pinterest-like (or Masonry-like) gallery using only CSS. (Yes, it uses flexbox, but also provides solid CSS-only fallbacks.)

And speaking of flexbox, another nice run-down of how to implement spanning and flowing boxes.

Moving beyond flexbox, we see that Chrome has made its lesser-heard-of cousin grid available, albeit under the “experimental features” flag. (And if you thought flexbox support was bad, wait until you see grid support… Way to go IE!

And as long as we’re talking about CSS from the future, how about CSS Regions? While support here is as you might have expected, at least there is a nice-looking polyfill!

An open-source CDN… What a freaking fantastic idea! Thanks to for sharing this find!

Interesting take on SVG background generation. Note that clicking the “Generate” button takes you to an editing screen where you can change all kinds of aspects to create completely SVGs that look completely different from the initial sample.

There is a lot of nay-saying going on about the usefulness of a glow-in-the-dark bicycle, primarily that it is a product of fear-mongering or that “no color can make you visible to someone that’s not looking for you”, but to me, anything that provides a little better chance of not getting hit, makes it worth while. Great concept, and interesting idea, I think.

Like most Smashing Magazine articles, this one’s lengthy, but it speaks about a subject dear to my heart: actually planning a responsive or mobile site, not just throwing something together, chopping out bits from “the real site”, or reducing your content to the point of being nearly a worthless experience. I’m so sick of getting mocks for desktop layouts, with notes like “and make it work on all devices” (“devices”, not even “screen sizes”).

Exploding cells in your brain certainly doesn’t sound like a good thing, but if the cells being exploded are cancer cells, it starts sounding not so bad… Will be interesting to see the results of further research.

And finally, when was the last time you had to copy a file to a portable external drive? Now where did I put that USB… Next time, just grab one of these 32GB post-it notes

Happy reading,
Atg

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