I’m going to start this issue off with a quick pat-on-the-back-selfie, by mentioning this article on adaptive web design which quotes my SitePoint article alongside such luminaries as Aaron Gustafson, Brad Frost, Laura Kalbag, and Kelly McCarthy! Yay! :-)
But enough about me, let’s talk about my friends, instead! I couldn’t be more proud of my good friends Scher Foord, Clarence Kwei, and Oneil Edwards for taking The New Yorker into the world of RWD, including changing over from TeamSite and Movable Type to WordPress! The change has gotten some nice press, from this from-the-inside-out perspective from FastCompany to an interview with the queen of design herself! Seriously proud, you guys, great job!!
Speaking of WordPress, some great insights on how to best set-up your site, from initial set-up to custom configurations to plugins to help speed things up, lock them down, and make your WP site hum as best it can!
You can also get some help from Grunt with your WordPress dev process, including creating i18n files, minification, concatenation, linting and more… Great stuff!
And once you think you’ve got it all running as best it can, let the Google PageSpeed Insights plugin have a look and tell you just how well you’re doing!
A Tumblr for DevTools Tips! Read, rinse, repeat…
Similarly, Chris Coyier offers a how to get started in web design article, but not like “how to get started in the business”, but more like “how to get set-up to start doing this”; I feel like I can always find some tip, something I can do differently, and ideally better!
We all know that, when animating an object across the page, using CSS transform/translate is better than top/left, right? Maybe some times, but maybe not always…
All developers should print this (yes, on paper) and post it at their work station, so they can continuously re-read and re-learn this, as a mantra…
Got SVGs? Want to see diffs that actually mean something, rather than just a slew of alphanumeric characters? Github’s got you covered…
Perfmap is a bookmarklet or Chrome Extension that adds heat map visualizations to pages to help track performance hotspots.
Part 1 of a JS best practices series, based on Christian Heilmann‘s JavaScript “Best Practices” slideshow. Part 2 is linked from the end of Part 1…
A new jQuery plugin, FocusPoint, allows you to specify the most important region of an image, and it will make sure that region stays on-screen, regardless of changes in screen size. It’s a great idea, but still sends a single image to all devices, which is unlikely to be the best thing for your users. Perhaps if it were used in conjunction with picture, but then you would need a new config for each source…
From the great Addy Osmani comes the video of his CSSconf EU 2014 presentation CSS Performance Tooling. Start-to-finish, all great tips.
Keeping with the Google-smarties, here is a great introduction to Chrome’s DevTools Device Mode. I was not aware of all the adaptations DevTools makes to help mimic real-life devices, but keep in mind, it still cannot properly mimic “device-specific features” (aka bugs!). More info about Device Mode here.
For you non-cyclists out there, this is easily the best analogy to what it feels like to be biking happily along, and suddenly realize your bike lane is ending (usually with just as much warning). And lest you think I am exaggerating, this is exactly how the bike lane leaving my village ends, dumping me right onto a busy road, just as it heads into a blind curve. Beauty, boneheads!
And finally, Twitter introduces a way to play audio inside tweets. In other news, all MySpace users simultaneously yawn… ;-)
Happy reading,
Atg