Hey,
while revising some code of the project I found out that last year when I introduced the funding status of this project online I had calculated costs by applying a fictional amount for my amount of work. Seeing this along with the slow decline of donations over the last months, I was curious how the actual funding state is. Finally, because I want to do everything in the open about this project, I decided to fix my mistake and applied real world numbers to the funding. Unfortunately, this commit was not very enlightening as it mostly is when working on a side project. I do love to work on this project and I will continue. But seeing the number of subscribers growing equally while seeing the support declining makes me a bit sad. I decided to not take any ads in here and will probably never change that, so I rely solely on donations by my readers.
Now after that little personal note (sorry, if it sounds a bit ranty), here are the best articles I found over the past week:
News
- npm private modules are here. That means you’re now able to have private modules running through the official npm registry so you don’t need to set one up yourself.
- Chrome 42 hit the stable channel this week and introduces the Push API, and fixes a lot of security issues.
- nginx will soon get HTTP/2, tries to let you use JavaScript as application language in the webserver, write a pluggable module API, and will provide a nginx plus service.
Concepts & Design
- Here is a fork and slight modification of the Adobe Source Code Pro font for usage in text editors and coding environments.
- This personal UX analysis of Twitter and Instagram reveals that it’s important how the user feels while and after using it.
Security
- Symantec shares some insights on how vulnerable almost all IoT (Internet of Things) devices are and what’s the effect in this pretty detailed report.
Accessibility
- Page Scrolling and the thing with mobile Safari’s VoiceOver utility. Some key principles you should understand when building an accessible mobile site by Marcy Sutton.
- Matt Gemmell shares how little changes can have a big effect using assistive technologies like VoiceOver while explaining how to apply fictional speech to HTML.
JavaScript
- How to build truly responsive logos with SVG, part two.
- A rundown of several online mapping tools you can use when needing a map on a website besides Google Maps. Because there are great other tools available.
- Learn how the Permissions API lets you check if you have the permission to use device APIs without a user prompt, with Chrome 43 introducing support for it as first vendor.
- When browser mess up at reporting errors. Raymond Camden wrote up what happens when you exceed the
localStoragequota and why IE in that case is a bad guy again. - HTML-GL is a tool solving the ‘slow DOM problem’ by creating WebGL representations of DOM elements and hiding the actual DOM after.
- How to implement a cut and copy functionality using modern techniques in all browsers, except Firefox and Safari. Matt Gaunt sums it up.
- Mike Macaulay shares some examples how to use custom elements to solve simple problems like a custom dropdown.
CSS / Sass
- This visual guide to flexbox is indeed one of the best I’ve seen so far to easily look up what property or value to use for which case.
- This little showdown of competing Sass libraries and compilers shows how you can eventually save many seconds in your buildchain.
Work life
- “Are we failing our clients?” It’s our job to educate the client as to why our work is worth the cost, so that onus is ours, but it can be a difficult obstacle to overcome.
- “Fullstack Employee”. This term is often heard, yet barely someone understands what it is and what this means. Chris Messina now summed it up and what to make out of it.
Go beyond…
- Instead of breathing faster and urging to speed up when you’re under water, you should stay calm and save your oxygene instead. When you feel the need to speed up, slow down.
- “I tried to be a cool kid of the web industry, but I’m not a cool kid”.
- Marc shares some insights on how he creates the schedule for his events, what is important and what else to take into consideration. While this might be of limited interest, I love such behind the scenes posts to find out how a great event is being done.
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