Hey,
it’s friday again and we face another week in web development. We have news like Google Code shutting down, articles about CSS regression testing, detecting injected elements on a site, and finally have a good read on freelancing, being an employee and that it doesn’t matter what you are if you have a good job. But it’s exactly that what matters and that your work-life balance is not only work but also not only life.
News
- Google Code is shutting down. This means all your repositories over there will disappear from it. It also means you should fix all references that you made in any website to a repository’s file. For example in the earlier days, the html5shiv was hosted there and often included to the direc trunk of Google Code. Google will also close Chart Tools API for creating static charts.
- Oh, if you ever wondered: Here’s the reason why Germans are afraid of Google.
- It seems that the CIA has compromised XCode directly so app authors publish their Apps with backdoors right integrated into it. This is super bad and hopefully will have legal consequences for the CIA.
Concepts & Design
- All fonts that you can find on Google WebFonts are now available on GitHub.
Generic / Tools
- Testing on CSS regressions with PhantomCSS, PhantomJS, CasperJS and Grunt. Micah Godbolt wrote up his experiences with setting up a tool that tests automatically for regressions. A story I followed since some months and now has been written up properly.
- You can achieve smarter CSS builds with Webpack by specifying UI dependencies and independent, isolated files.
- npm private modules are coming soon which is super useful and I can’t await it becoming available.
Web Performance
- How do you detect if some content has been injected into your website by third-parties? A little CSP feature can help you here and do amazing things.
- What’s the best way to include dyamic responsive background-images, I asked this week. Some interesting answers were posted and this one is my preferred choice.
- How CloudFlare handles DDoS Mitigation with a Virtual DNS.
- Jeremy Keith on inlining critical CSS for first-time visits while caching the CSS file in browser’s cache for repeated visits. Pretty clever technique.
- How to improve user experience when you query data via HTTP: Use HTTP/1.1 Cache injection for your REST application. Not easy to understand but a good insight.
HTML / SVG
- This article explains how you can transform your illustration into a smart SVG using illustrio.
- SVGs and Icon Sets are super.
JavaScript
js;drmeans JavaScript required; didn’t read, an article by Tantek Çelik in which he explains how bad sites are that rely on JavaScript to work.- VisSense.js observes visibility changes of DOM elements and informs you when an element becomes hidden, partly visible or fully visible.
CSS / Sass
- While you clearly should avoid using
!importanttoo often in your code, it’s still a valid and useful tool of CSS. - Why abbreviating words for class names is not logical and should be avoided.
- Harry Roberts shared the answer to a question he received about “Can CSS be too modular?”.
Work life
- “Since I’ve tasted what it is to work a full-time job that is fantastic and fulfilling, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a job a good one. And I think work/life balance is a real thing—it isn’t all just life.”
- We often don’t follow this but it’s a great advice: Exhaustion is not a status symbol.
Go beyond…
- Your expectations and the reality of life.
- An updated guide to some of the best tools for lettering today, and examples of them in action.
And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me via Flattr, gratipay or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm