Remember RSS? Me too! I still love it, and still rely heavily on it for content curation and consumption! But lots of sites no longer offer this simple feature… :-( Well Raymond Camden shares RSS Anything, a tool to “Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed”. Handy.

And if you don’t currently have a fave RSS reader, apparently RSS Parrot can turn Mastodon into your feed reader!

And now that we’ve got our RSS readers all setup, we need some websites to pull in! But Jason Velazquez asks us Where have all the websites gone? A eye-opening question, and a scary-but-true answer…

And not to get tooooo dystopian here, but Mia Sato writes about how the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms, complete with a case study.

Okay, trying to move back out of the darkness, Kevin Powell shares his favorite Under the radar CSS features for your CSS reset. Really like the text-wrap: balance and pretty, as well as the scroll-padding-top! hanging-punctuation is a nice touch, too, albeit only in Webkit, for now…

And keeping the positive vibes moving, here is one more from Kevin, where he lists all the great new CSS features that were released, or got improved support, in 2023.

Moving right from the great new stuff we got in 2023 to how we can use it in 2024, Lee Robinson shares how he is writing CSS in 2024, which is really a “collection of my notes and thoughts about the CSS ecosystem and the tools I’m currently using”. Almost kind of a “CSS reset” for how you might write CSS now-days…

While we talking about fancy new CSS stuffs, Zach Saucier says he was “trying to use container queries and container units during [his] blog rebuild” but there “wasn’t a one-stop shop for learning about them”, so he wrote one. Damned kind of you, Zach!

And while we’re talking about fancy new stuffs in general, ever wonder What a PWA Can Do Today? I certainly do, frequently, and now I know how to find out! Yay!!

If you use custom fonts on a site, your users likely download more than they need. While this might be only a few KBs, it could also be MBs! Dave Millington shares Fontimize, a tool to “Subset Fonts to Exactly and Only Your Website’s Used Characters”. My guess is that this works better for smaller, static-type sites, and might be more of a challenge for bigger, e-commerce-type sites?

Anyone else having trouble identifying what will be the LCP for pages where the content changes frequently, say via a CMS, like an e-commerce site? Philip Walton suggests we let the page tell its future-self what the LCP is…

Switching from LCP to CLS, Keerthana Krishnan presents a checklist for things that might trigger CLS.

And a big part of what makes CLS so bad is that it typically causes reflow (when the browser has to “repaint” your page in viewport). Well Paul Irish shares his list of what causes reflow!

And switching from CLS to INP, Chrome announces their formal “intent to ship” for LoAF! No explicit word from Mozilla or WebKit yet.

And while we’re chatting about CWVs, ever wonder how your fave JS framework/library stacks up?

Brian Birtles‘s Weird things engineers believe about Web development actually goes both directions, and is highly insightful and entertaining. Saw myself a few times in there… :-)

Tim Vereecke writes about his technique for bypassing browser cache for recently logged-in users. Basically appends a querystring to same-domain URLs until the TTL has cleared; also uses a tiny script to elegantly hide that querystring in the user’s browser. I also really like Tim’s thought about maybe doing all this via a Service Worker, too…

And finally, for anyone looking for a blog hosting platform, perhaps consider PostHaven? They describe themselves as “the blogging platform designed to outlive us”… Morbid, sure, but also an interesting idea:

Pay for at least a year and your site stays online.
If we can’t charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online.

Of course, as long as they can afford to do that… :-)

Happy reading,
Atg

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