Lost in Time
A list of reasons to include the time and timezone in Date strings and some JavaScript functions I use to consume and format them.
article2024 3 posts Permalink ¶
How I shaved 1.5 minutes off my Eleventy build time
I had a revelation earlier today that solved a long-standing performance issue I’ve been having with the initial build of my Eleventy website, and here’s how it saved me a bunch of time!
articlePrometheus
Reflecting on what striving for success has meant to me over the years until today.
article2023 8 posts Permalink ¶
Can you teach an old design system new colours?
Over the years, I’ve changed the colours used across my website a number of times, and I’m happy with what I have now, but what I’m going to talk about today are formats for defining colours and some recent behind-the-scenes
changes I made to how I define colours on my website, making theming my website easier.
Halfway to CSS Naked Day 2024
What better time is there to prepare for next year’s CSS Naked Day than the halfway point? Certainly better than the day before, take it from me!
articleDouble-Double
Today I’m introducing a little dash of CSS syntactic sugar I’ve been using a lot when building components recently that I’m calling the Double-Double technique.
articleNot without sacrifice
With the boom of JavaScript frameworks and legends-come-true like the new CSS parent selector, we’ve borne witness to an explosion of new technologies and ways to build for the web. But what tradeoffs have we made for all these new bells and whistles?
articleDynamic Heading Borders
I found a useful trick for achieving the long-standing design of Level 2 Headings across my website.
noteCSS Naked Day JavaScript Function
Rather than remove CSS from my website manually on CSS Naked Day, I have employed a short JavaScript function to perform the check for me.
articleWhy I participated in CSS Naked Day
CSS Naked Day has come and gone for this year, but I’ll be making it a point to participate for many years to come.
articleGenerating Automatic ShortURLs with NewBase60
I’m still auto-generating ShortURLs for each of my posts using Tantek Çelik’s NewBase60, but in a much more organised fashion and leaning into the JavaScript-based ecosystem of Eleventy.
article2022 9 posts Permalink ¶
Copilot me if you can
A short tale about how GitHub Copilot generated some “real” data about my website.
articleThe Environment-Aware Wrapper
Here’s a handy CSS technique to make sure your content isn’t obscured by the pesky notch
that seems to be present on many phones these days, and it probably already fits nicely into your existing codebase!
Moving Targets
I was just working on some styling changes to my website and fell into a rabbit hole on URLs, the <mark> element and :target pseudo-class, and ended up writing an animation as a handy technique for drawing the reader’s attention.
A Case for the 1-Dimensional Grid
Reaching for Grid might feel like overkill for a one-column layout, but I hope this technique shows how useful it is in understanding what your CSS is doing!
articleWebmention Setup for Eleventy
Here’s a quick run-through of how I retrieve and utilise Webmentions with my Eleventy website.
articleIt’s all relative!
What’s the deal with relative units? Let’s find out.
articleChanging with the times
Lessons learned, pieces of wisdom (and folly), and other things I have to say after running a website blog for a while.
articleThe Beloved Refactor
Following the incredible high from a great conference, I just finished an extremely refreshing refactor of the CSS on my site. Here’s what I did.
article10000
It’s been nearly nine years since I last updated my website's logo, the ethereal Raven, but sixteen years since I began my journey into web development. To commemorate reaching a 5-bit milestone, this year seemed like a good one...
note2021 2 posts Permalink ¶
Fun stuff I’m proud of achieving on my website recently.
noteDeep Dive into Colour
How to make powerful use of CSS Variables, colour spaces, and the cascade using Bowhead.
article2020 2 posts Permalink ¶
Time to Cache Up
For a long time I’ve been searching for a sound solution to storing the entire Webmention history of my blog, as packaging it up with the rest of the repository was not cutting it for me. Enter the world of async.
articleSassy Lobotomised Owl
Managing spacing between elements and components on your page can be a tiring task if undertaken manually. This is where the lobotomised owl comes in: a short, simple snippet of CSS that simplifies this whole process for you. In this article I’ll explain how I make use of it in a more dynamic way using a SCSS mixin.
article2019 6 posts Permalink ¶
The Flip-Flop Technique
I recently implemented a colour scheme toggler in the footer of my website, following Andy Bell’s guide, Create a user controlled dark or light mode, and found a wonky but fun alternative solution for styling my dark theme which leverages CSS’s filter property.
articleReply Targets
Providing a useful context to content written in response to someone else's blog post, tweet, toot, etc. helps a reader to understand the conversational nature of these back-and-forths. What abstractions can we make to the data that holds these reply targets, and how can those abstractions make for a richer reading experience and for a leaner publishing workflow?
articleAnother 🐇 🕳 idea… Input a YouTube channel URL → The channel’s Atom feed is added to your Microsub "YouTube" channel. YouTube subscriptions without a Google account. No idea how original this idea is, but for now I’ve built https://chrisburnell.com/get-youtube-feed/...
noteLiquidBase60
I have started auto-generating ShortURLs for each of my posts, old and new, and opted to implement for representing the unique URLs, but I've done so with Liquid so it plays nicely with my Jekyll-powered website.
articleSparkline Sound-Off
I have been following in the footsteps of Jeremy Keith for a few months now. Dotted around my website, now, are sparklines, representing my activity over time. As an added bonus, a little tune based on the sparkline's values plays when you click on it. With a moderate amount of musical theory under my belt, here's how I accomplished that audio delight.
articleLate night coding means I’ve managed to create a clear division between my website’s various post types. And alongside that, I’m now using NewBase60 for my shortened URLs, which happens for each of my posts automatically. 😌
note2018 8 posts Permalink ¶
I gave a lightning talk in 2016 about writing readable and maintainable code, and @DvBerzon is doing some fantastic research in this area that really intrigues me. I’m eagerly waiting for the next phase of research and results! http://howreadable.com/
noteSuper pleased to say that I just gave a short presentation about #indieweb to my team at work, and I didn’t butcher the explanation too badly, so everyone’s on-board! Feels great to be a part of this community and welcome...
noteAt long last, I’ve managed to add the ability to edit my existing notes through my Micropub endpoint, and given my track record of totally making no mistakes, this is a good thing. #indieweb
noteI’ve made an average of 1.498 commits/day to my website over the last 5.5 years. ~670 of those commits contained fix
in the commit message.
Do with that information what you will while I continue to endlessly chase my own...
Numerals, Romanticised
For a better part of the year, I've been working on a Jekyll-based Progressive Web App, BloodBuilder, for managing my Sorcerer in a game of Pathfinder I've been playing with some friends. One of the many intricate parts of logic involves the ability to convert Arabic numerals to and from Roman numerals, so I wrote a simple Liquid include to handle this.
articleI’ve sat down with three developers this week to help them diagnose some errors, but as soon as I sat down the errors mysteriously vanished. Anyway, hit me up if you want a quote for me to come sit next...
noteVariables for Both
Now that CSS Custom Properties, or CSS Variables, are becoming a solid standard, I'm using a method to map their values to CSS Variables whilst providing a value-as-is fallback using a straightforward syntax in a SCSS function and mixin.
articleLiving Deliberately
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that...
2017 4 posts Permalink ¶
Crossing Guards
Throttle back on your scroll events and watch out for the IntersectionObserver!
articleNo Three Snowflakes Are Alike
I developed a Sass function to generate a list of unique pairs given a List or Map of data, so I extrapolated the idea and refactored the function to generate a series of unique groups of size n.
articleUnique Pairs in SCSS
In creating a from-scratch grid for a redevelopment project, I was using SCSS to loop through various bits of data to generate a bunch of repetitive CSS, but I realised I had no DRY way of generating a list of unique pairs of items from a given dataset, so I set out to find out how.
articleRemapping Ranges in Sass
Great inspiration can sometimes be found in exploring available opportunities and embracing new ideas. In this article, I'll try to replicate a foreign concept in a familiar way, and explain why I decided to even do it.
article2016 3 posts Permalink ¶
April LWS Talk
I gave a talk at London Web Standards and asked the question, So how can we write media queries that are both consistent and succinct?
Shoot for the Moon
Don't be half-minded when dealing with fractions and pixels. How can we ensure all browsers interpret fractions in our CSS equally?
articleAn Extended Response
If you've dabbled in Sass before, you're likely familiar with @extend and @mixin, but is there any use-case for @extend? Given the benchmark performance of the two, can we still be confident in the cascade when @extending in Sass?
2015 2 posts Permalink ¶
Backscratching Revisited
I revised my original technique for styling default elements and took it a step further to scratch the greatest number of backs.
articleTheming Pinboard
I recently decided I would embark on the task of theming Pinboard. Here's how I did it.
article2014 3 posts Permalink ¶
On Your Marks, Get Set, Wait
What's really important when reading an article online? Content should always come first, and give users the option for more later.
articleA Slice of Heaven
We know that webpages are composed of text and boxes. Lots and lots of boxes. But with the power and might of CSS3 we can do some fancy stuff that never used to be possible.
articleLet’s Look Back
I haven't published a new article in a while now, but I haven't been twiddling my thumbs. Let's look at what happened behind-the-scenes in the last eight months since my first article.
article2013 5 posts Permalink ¶
I’ll Scratch Your Back, And Mine Too
I've been playing around with CSS content and attribute selectors recently, and came across a useful trick for styling default elements.
articleViewport Woes
I've been around the block and seen many variations of variables and syntax in viewport meta tags. What's the correct way to go about it? And maybe I'll comment on the state of browsers today as well.
articlePersistent Shadows
How easy is it to keep a shadow's direction consistent whilst rotating an element?
articleAnnoying Navigation CSS
Navigation is crucial to a functional website. It is how your users find the information they're after; get it right, and your users are happy—get it wrong, and they go insane!
articleFirst Article Ever
Well, I've finally gotten my site up and running to a point where I can consider it to be a success. What was the process, and what did it involve? What mistakes did I make that you can avoid?
article