WordPress The Weary WordPress Dev This isn’t a post ‘defending WordPress’, or saying you should give it a shot. It’s more about the general responses and attitudes I’ve experienced as someone who’s put a decent amount of time into using the software, and building sites and apps with it. I totally
CSS Theming with CSS Custom Properties I remember scoffing at the thoughts of variables in CSS. “Haha. Oh internet, we have Sass!” Alas, I was a fool. Now it’s getting to the stage where I might say “Haha. Oh internet, we have CSS!” when faced with the option of using a pre-processor. There’s still
JavaScript Page Visibility API The Page Visibility API lets you detect when a page is visible or in focus for a user. The page is deemed no longer visible if they switch to another tab or when the window is minimized. So what is it good for? The MDN Docs do a great job
Use AppleScript to Automate with iTerm Sometimes when you’re working on a project, be it work or personal, you might only be running a command in the terminal like npm run dev. Other times it might be a bit more involved. Maybe you have a local server running in one tab with another tab to
CSS Variable Fonts I read a great article about variable fonts the other day, and saw that it’s possible to use animations. Specifically, I wanted to look at scaling the weight since it can be much more granular with variable fonts. Now, I’m no craftsman when it comes to animations and
CMS Building My Site Part II: Setup In the first part of this series I talked about the decisions that led to using the likes of Craft and Laravel Mix. So now it’s time to get it all up and running. Craft At the moment, while Craft is in it’s release candidate stage, it’s
JavaScript Tip for React PropTypes with Storybook I’ve recently begun working with React.js, and I’m really enjoying it! There’s so much to learn, but there’s one tip I’ve picked up that’s saving me some time. I was doing some research and I came across this brilliant article called CSS Architecture
First Seven Jobs Well, more like six-ish. If even. When I first saw #firstsevenjobs my first thought was "oh, I haven’t had that many jobs, I guess this isn’t for me". I suppose I took it a bit too literally. Some of the jobs I have had were more
Resourceful Learning You’re speeding down the information highway during a blizzard. Data is pelting off your windscreen with reckless abandon. You stick your head out of the driver-side window to grab a glimpse of where you’re going, but you’re instantly blinded. There’s shards of data sticking out of
JavaScript Vue.js and Spotify Experiment Note: This no longers works after Spotify updated their API, I do apologise. This is a small experiment for me to try and put together what I’ve learned when working with Vue.js. I could be doing this all wrong with Vue, but I had fun doing it. Onwards
Up and Atom The past year or so has been a flurry of text-editor switching. Sublime, now Atom, and Sublime again, wait now I’m using PHPStorm, back to Sublime… It’s a wonder how I get any work done, but I’m finally settling down with Atom, so I thought I’d
CSS The (Clip) Path of Least Resistance We may be familiar with the formable border property, which has been used for many a year for generating arrows to add a little bit of pizazz to our pages. I only recently got a chance to play with the clip-path property to take these flourishes to a new, scalable
CMS Timber and Twig Reignited My Love for WordPress In what can only be described as a milestone in my life, I had an article published on CSS-Tricks. It was a great experience working with Chris Coyier to get this article put together and put out there. Read the article: Timber and Twig Reignited My Love for WordPress.
JavaScript Expanding menu with GSAP This is a straightforward enough bit of code that will allow you to create a re-usable expanding menu. There are many, many ways you could go about this. I figured a simple Object would be enough for this example. We’ll start with the mark-up. The most important bits are:
JavaScript Lightweight Utility Object I’m working on a little project, and it’s fairly lightweight. I ended up creating a JavaScript object with a few functions to help with the most common tasks, e.g. add class, toggle class, select element… It’s a collection assembled from You Might Not Need jQuery. Example
Responsibilities of a Web Person This post is about what I think it means to be a web person. I’m using ‘person’ here because that’s what you get when you strip away all the titles. We’re people first. Working with computers is a large part of our daily lives, so it’s
WordPress Getting Started with WordPress and Unit Testing Recently, I’ve begun working on a project built with WordPress. One of the requirements involves writing tests and outputting a report. In this post, I hope to show how I’ve set up the project to utilise PHPUnit and WP_UnitTestCase. I’ve had minimal exposure to PHPUnit in
Pace Yourself When I first started college I was full-sure I was learning to become a web designer. I had experience with PhotoShop from my teen years when creating signature graphics, or “sigs”, for people on forums, or designing little sites on Freewebs (mostly with Flash-based games embedded on the page. They
