Programmers and designers—and nerds in general, really—can be kind of difficult for non-nerdy people to understand. The reverse is also true. Programmer types can get the worst of it, though. Generalizing broadly, the mental world they tend to live in is full of things that make sense because they follow specific rules. Those rules can get infinitely complex; but the basic principles of programming can get you past most of the problems you might encounter. It was probably a misplaced semicolon,...
There’s good news for everyone who uses stock photos, today: finding the right one just got easier. That is, if you use Shutterstock. Shutterstock is taking a page from the Google Images play-book by implementing a reverse image search. Then, they took it a step further by giving us “visually similar” search. Really, most of what you need to know is right in the names. Anyone who has dragged a photo into Google Images to find the original source knows what I’m talking about. Now, you can do the same...
StringBean introduces itself with the slogan, “The 4K featherweight framework”. Now, I wasn’t exactly skeptical. Despite the prevalence of massive CSS and HTML frameworks (you know which two I mean), there are plenty of tiny frameworks about. I’ve seen and tested many, and even used one or two of them for live projects. StringBean has, however, managed to impress me with how much it’s managed to fit into a small space. As always, frameworks stay small by sticking to an incredibly basic set...
Do you feel comfortable in a text editor, but not so much in the terminal? Then this might be the series for you! In User-friendly front-end articles, I’ll be outlining ways to streamline the front-end development process in ways that don’t involve terminals, compilers, or endless chains of libraries. Don’t get me wrong, those things are great. However, we’re not all full-time developers. It can take more time to figure out which libraries to use, how to make them build properly, and so on,...
We DIY types do love our tiny scripts, frameworks, and CMSs, sometimes. There’s something about starting from near-scratch, with some of the annoying stuff taken out of the equation, that feels amazing. There’s so much potential on that blank screen, or in that empty text file. Today, I’m talking about cory, which bills itself as a “tiny generator for static sites”. It’s Node-based, and it lives up to this promise. The source code for the whole thing, when zipped, weighs in at just 235KB....
That’s right WordPress-lovers! This one’s for you. The dream of many a startup is to sell stuff online. I mean, it sounds great, right? The website handles half the work, and you just send the stuff out. If your goods are electronic, you may never have to deal directly with the customer. You know, unless something goes wrong... but I digress. Many online vendors, preferring the familiar comfort of the WordPress admin interface, have turned to plugins to provide them with the e-commerce functionality...
This is a part of the Under-appreciated series, where we explore CSS frameworks that are well-made and have great ideas, but never took off like the “big two”. For a full introduction, see the first article in the series. Outline bills itself as "The clean and simple framework". Clean? Simple? You have my attention! Really, though, Outline is a pretty basic, SASS-based framework. Now, if you’ve read this series, you know that’s not an issue. Basic can be very useful. The question is, as always:...
WordPress and other CMS’ like it have taught us well that not every site needs to be dynamic. In fact, it can be hell on the server. So, just about every decent coder out there has taken a stab at making a static site generator. This is a good thing. If they keep this up, we may one day have one that’s user-friendly. For now, they are decidedly developer-centric, and somewhat experimental. At this stage, they are fascinating. Today’s offering is the appropriately named Middleman, and it’s built...