Web Development Articles

• A9 and the demise of SiteInfo (Obsolete) Amazon.com’s search site, A9, has scaled back drastically. The rewards program is gone, as are bookmarks and history. They’ve even discontinued the A9 toolbar.
• Alternate Sharing Buttons (Now with Less Tracking!) Sharing buttons that don’t talk to Facebook, Twitter, or even a third party until you actually click on a button! I’m testing SharingButtons.io on one site, and Share42 on another.
• ALWAYS Put the Record ID in the Edit Form Users might have multiple pages of your app open in different tabs or windows. Use a page-specific ID, not something shared like a cookie or session data.
• Auto-Switching a Website to Dark Mode You can easily tell your site to use darker colors when a visitor is using a dark theme by using CSS media queries.
• CSS Outlines What makes Outline different from Border.
• Don’t Use Infinite Scroll Infinite scroll is like finishing a sandwich, and the server plops another one in front of you without asking what you want on it, or if you want it at all.
• Eleventy data cascade not picking up front matter on layouts (Obsolete) Fixed in 1.0.1: Eleventy normally combines the front matter in layouts along with the templates, data files, etc…unless the layout is set globally.
• Feedly 404 Feedback Loop (Obsolete) I set up my site to publish an RSS feed of 404 hits, and added it to Feedly…which tried to retrieve the broken URLs, adding a new item to the report…
• Focus! — Login Form Fail (Obsolete) If you’re going to set the initial focus in a form field, don’t use onload(). Chances are you’ll end up moving the cursor while power users are already typing.
• Google Toolbar AutoFill is Weird (Obsolete) This form had name and e-mail fields, but AutoFill only recognized e-mail. I figured, OK, people might be using this, let’s see if I can adjust the page and make it compatible.
• IE7 disappearing float bug (Obsolete) In IE7, the exact wrong combination of floats and italics can make a floated element disappear.
• Keep Numbers in Server Errors ‘404’ transcends language and font barriers.
• Make Feedly Notice an Updated WordPress Post by Changing the GUID Changing the GUID of an updated post in your RSS/Atom feed will tell feed readers that it’s a new post. Here’s some WordPress code that will let you do that with a custom field.
• Mobile Web Layouts vs. the Viewport Mobile web browsers now use a larger virtual screen to provide an imitation desktop experience - even if you’ve provided a better one tailored for small screens.
• On Broken HTML From time to time the idea is put forth that less common browsers need to start dealing with bad code. There are two problems with that view.
• Pure CSS Buttons As part of a minor site optimizing kick, I replaced the validation labels with something smaller, less obtrusive, and directly on the page. I tried to duplicate the look of the classic antipixel-style buttons in CSS.
• Readable Email and Web Pages It’s 2024. If you’re still designing websites or email like you would design an 8.5x11" promotional hand-out on a sheet of paper, you really haven’t been paying attention to how people use the internet over the past decade.
• Retroactive Robots Exclusion at the Wayback Machine How the Wayback Machine handles changes to robots.txt exclusions.
• Reusable PHP Please, when developing your plugins, be sure to always use the full opening tag for PHP instead of just <?
• Select All of a Code Sample Using Minimal JS A short (~10 lines) JavaScript fragment to select an entire code snippet when someone clicks, taps, or presses a key on it.
• Separate Stop/Reload Buttons When a button changes in response to something over which you have no control, it may change between the time your brain tells your finger to click or tap and the time it registers.
• Share to the Fediverse with ShareOpenly A share button that connects to Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog, Threads and more. Here’s how I’ve hooked it up to Eleventy.
• Simple Browser Categorization (Obsolete) Sometimes you want to know exactly what software people (or bots) are using to view your website. Sometimes all you want to know is which rendering engine’s quirks you need to cater to.
• The Right Tool… Think about when to use client-side scripting vs. server-side scripting.
• User-Agent Spoofing Explained Let’s say someone decides that they’ll only allow blondes into an event. Depending on how its done, UA spoofing can be like wearing a blonde wig, or it can be like a brunette wearing a badge that says “Blonde.”
• Using Unicode Half-Stars Symbols in Ratings Filled and outlined stars have been in Unicode forever. Half-stars have been available since Unicode 11 (2018), but font support is still spotty. Fortunately you can embed a font on your website that does support the symbols and rate something four and a half stars.
• Web Design is Like Pizza A lot of pages aren’t as specific as the authors think they are. When you write code and test it on only one browser, you’re not testing that the code is correct, you’re testing that that browser makes the same assumptions you do.
• Web Font Downloaded Twice When Preloading Weirdly enough, you need to add a ‘crossorigin’ property even if the font file is on the same site.
• Webslices and Microsummaries (Obsolete) Both features have since been removed, but they offered and interesting way to let visitors know when a site had been updated.
• What’s Dynamic About It? It doesn’t really update that often: maybe 3 or 4 times a month. Is it really worth building that file dynamically?
• When Not To Use A Redirect Don’t use a redirect when changing a setting on your web server would do the job better.

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