Three WP plugins to help improve your site’s page load speed. All three look really good, can’t wait to test them on a site that uses JS… :-)
The RICG Responsive Images Plugin made quite a splash when it landed, and my initial thoughts haven’t changed. But it is solid-looking, so here is a screencast on setting up and using it.
From Jenn Lukas comes a fun presentation on choosing and pairing fonts, The Developer’s Ampersandwich.
VisSense.js: A utility library for observing visibility changes of DOM elements. Immediately know when an element becomes hidden, partly visible or fully visible.
Handy for RWD / AWD!
Did you know you can use background gradient images for bullets? Well, unless you care about Firefox, that is, but as Eric Meyer points out in the article, “this is a textbook case of progressive enhancement”: just define a bullet type, then define an image. Voila!
Nice tip from Thomas Fuchs, apparently keyframes must explicitly match in order for an animation to work? Huh.
Reframing Accessibility for the Web:
We need to change the way we talk about accessibility… Not “people with disabilities.” Not “blind people and deaf people.” Not “people who have cognitive disabilities” or “men who are color blind” or “people with motor disabilities.” People. People who are using the web. People who are using what you’re building.
(Emphasis mine.)
And in that line of thinking, Designing For The Elderly: Ways Older People Use Digital Technology Differently is a thought-provoking article to help us think about people we may not typically think about.
Transformicons, more than meets the eye! :-) Pretty cool animation icons!
And speaking of bouncy thingies, these bouncy navigation items are also pretty cool.
A new version of Grunticon is out. We use it at work to handle the SVG logos, icons, and infographics on our company website, though we don’t use it exactly like they, or Chris Coyier, does in this demo; we use a server-side device detection, so we can avoid the JS implementation. However you employ Grunticon doesn’t matter, just use it, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
How fast is realtime? Great article on the historical answer, the current answer, and what it means to your customers and business…
Five CSS-only, accessible toggle-style checkboxes. Slick. All five.
Five Easy Ways to Be a Better Web Professional. Nice, light read, and I couldn’t agree more.
I have not been forced to use social media widgets in a very long time, thankfully, but I know others out there must still have to deal with them, because I see them on websites that I visit… Here is the same method I have used most often. Sure beats 11 additional requests, 183.7kb of extra bloat, and up to 7 extra seconds of download…
I thought I saw something like this from CSS Tricks some time back, but I can’t find it now. In any event, this pattern for offering common email prefixes and correction is a really slick one; browsers should do this already… Especially for mobile!
Not sure how many of you still have think about good old IE8, but if you do, then IE8 Linter might be a handy tool for your arsenal.
And finally, what’s the best Star Wars job for you? (Kind of annoying that the graphic doesn’t link to a larger, readable version, so here’s the image, which you can then zoom into; also, the “Source” looks more like it is the page’s sponsor…)
Happy reading,
Atg