Post pobrano z: Eleventy Love

Been seeing a lot of Eleventy action lately. It’s a smaller player in the world of static site generators, but I think it’s got huge potential because of how simple it is, yet does about anything you’d need it to do. It’s Just JavaScript™.

• Jason Lengstorf and Zach Leatherman did a Learn with Jason episode on it.
• Reginald Hunt has a big ol’ guide on it.
• Phil Hawksworth has all these starters for it, like EleventyOne and ElevenTail.
• Andy Bell has Hylia, another starter that’s preconfigured with Netlify CMS and a bunch of other goodies.

The post Eleventy Love appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: Autumn (macOS window manager)

I love how nerdy this is. Autumn allows you to write JavaScript to control your windows. Get this window, move it over here. Nudge this window over. There are all sorts of APIs, like keyboard command helpers and doing things on events, like waking up from sleep.

I love that it exists, but for the moment, my window management mostly consists of: grab this window and chuck it on the left half of the screen, and grab this window and chuck it on the right half of the screen. That and just a handful of other simple things are handled really nicely by Moom.

Doing life tasks with JavaScript is only gonna get bigger and bigger. I love controlling and querying Spotify with GraphQL.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Autumn (macOS window manager) appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: Third-Party Components at Their Best

I’m a fan of the componentization of the web. I think it’s a very nice way to build a website at just about any scale (except, perhaps, the absolute most basic). There are no shortage of opinions about what makes a good component, but say we scope that to third-party for a moment. That is, components that you just use, rather than components that you build yourself as part of your site’s unique setup.

What makes a third-party component good? My favorite attribute of a third-party component is when it takes something hard and makes it easy. Particularly things that recognize and properly handle nuances, or things that you might not even know enough about to get right.

Perhaps you use some component that does pop-up contextual menus for you. It might perform browser edge detection, such as ensuring the menu never appears cut off or off-screen. That’s a tricky little bit of programming that you might not get right if you did it yourself — or even forget to do.

I think of the <Link /> component that React Router has or what’s used on Gatsby sites. It automatically injects aria-current="page" for you on the links when you’re on that page. You can and probably should use that for a styling hook! And you probably would have forgotten to program that if you were handling your own links.

In that same vein, Reach UI Tabs have rigorous accessibility baked into them that you probably wouldn’t get right if you hand-rolled them. This React image component does all sorts of stuff that is relatively difficult to pull off with images, like the complex responsive images syntax, lazy loading, placeholders, etc. This is, in a sense, handing you best practices for „free.”

Here’s a table library that doesn’t even touch UI for you, and instead focuses on other needs you’re likely to have with tables, which is another fascinating approach.

Anyway! Here’s what y’all said when I was asking about this. What makes a third-party component awesome? What do the best of them do? (besides the obvious, like good docs and good accessibility)? Some of these might be at-odds. I’m just listing what people said they like.

• Plug-and-play. It should „just work” with minimal config.
• Lots of editable demos
• Highly configurable
• „White label” styling. Don’t bring too strong of design choices.
• Styled via regular CSS so you can BYO own styling tools
• Fast
• Small
• Is installable via a package manager
• Can be manually instantiated
• Can be given a DOM node where it can go
• Follows a useful versioning scheme
• Is manintained, particularly for security
• Has a public roadmap
• Is framework-agnostic
• Doesn’t have other dependencies
• Uses intuitive naming conventions
• Supports internationalization
• Has lots of tests

Anything you’d add to that list?

The post Third-Party Components at Their Best appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Post pobrano z: NetNewsWire and Feedbin

NetNewsWire is one of the classic RSS apps, debuting in 2002. I was pretty stoked when it went 5.0 and was open-sourced in August 2019! You can snag it right here. (Sorry, Mac only.)

It’s super nice, is fast, and looks great. It has just the right features.

But… I thought, at least at first, that really prefer websites for reading RSS content. I have multiple machines. I have mobile devices. I don’t want my RSS to be limited to my laptop, I want an online service.

Well! I found out that NetNewsWire syncs with my favorite website for RSS: Feedbin. The syncing works flawlessly. Both unread items and all the organization. In fact, the UI for organizing feeds is so nice in NetNewsWire that I managed everything there and was pleasantly surprised how it all synced perfectly with Feedbin.

Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed. pic.twitter.com/mtcyKhEVet

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 7, 2020

I know a lot of people miss Google Reader, but I think we’ve arrived at an even better place after all these years. The Google Reader UI for Google Reader was OK, but the main benefit was that it was the central place where everything synced together. That meant people could experiment by building readers and could use whatever they wanted. Feedbin clearly has APIs that can handle those types of things, so perhaps it could become that central hub service, which would be awesome.

I use Reeder on iOS, which also syncs with Feedbin. The central hub is real.

I know a lot of people love Feedly too, which is also good. I just click with Feedbin better. I particularly like the Feedbin feature where it gives me an email address I can have newsletters sent to, letting me subscribe to a ton of them the same way I do with sites.

The post NetNewsWire and Feedbin appeared first on CSS-Tricks.