If you have an e-commerce website, then SSL is mandatory for safely processing credit cards. But even if you aren’t processing payments, you should still seriously consider secure HTTP (or HTTPS), especially now that I’m going to show you how to set it up quickly, for free. Let’s get started.
In short, SSL is the “S” in HTTPS. It adds a layer of encryption to HTTP that ensures that the recipient is actually who they claim to be and that only authorized recipients can decrypt the message to see its contents.
In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to draw the Facebook ‘Haha’ emoji in Adobe Illustrator.
The Steps (1-13)
1. Create a New Document.
2. Select the Ellipse Tool, Left-click anywhere on the artboard to create a new ellipse. Give this new ellipse a Width and Height of 600 pixels.
3. With the circle shape selected, Double-click the Color Picker in the Toolbar on the left, and specify a 6 digit hex colour of #FFD972. This is the yellow colour that we will be using for our emoji.
4. In the Swatches Palette, click the New Swatch option to save this colour as a swatch.
5. Select the yellow circle, go to Edit > Copy, and Edit > Paste in Place to create a copy of the circle shape. Give this copy any temporary colour for now, and hold Shift + Alt to scale down from a corner towards the centre. This second circle should be approximately 70-80% of it’s original size.
6. Using the Direct Selection Tool, Left-click on the top-centre anchor point and press Delete or Backspace to remove this anchor point. You should now be left with a semi-circle. Give this the colour #1D1D1B.
7. Select the Ellipse Tool and draw an ellipse over the top of this new semi-circle, covering approximately half of the semi-circle shape – this is going to be the tongue for our emoji. Give this new ellipse the colour #F25268.
8. Select both the semi-circle, and the newly created ellipse, and in the Pathfinder Palette, select Divide. Using the Direct Selection Tool, you can now select the excess of the tongue shape (anything outside of the semi-circle) and press Delete or Backspace to remove.
9. Next, select the Pen Tool and Left-click anywhere on the artboard to create an anchor point. Left-click to create a second anchor point at approximately 30-40 degrees to the first anchor point, and then Left-click to create a third anchor point, at the same angle and directly underneath the first anchor point. The shape should look like a triangle, with one side left open and not joined up.
10. Give this new shape a Stroke Width of your choice, for example 13 pixels, and in the Stroke Palette, select the Cap as Round, and the Corner as Round. This shape represents the first eye, and should be positioned on the left-side of the emoji.
11. With the eye shape selected, go to Edit > Copy, and Edit > Paste in Place to create a copy. Move this copy over to the right side of the emoji, and go to Object > Transform > Reflect, and reflect along the Vertical Axis. Give both eye shapes the colour #1D1D1B.
12. Drag your mouse over all of the shapes to select everything on the artboard, and go to Object > Expand. Select the options Fill and Stroke and click OK.
13. Lastly, with everything still selected go to Object > Group, to group all shapes together and easily move your emoji icon around the artboard as one object.
The following is a guest post by Adam Coti. Follow along as Adam whittles down the necessary meta tags for social media to display rich previews. If you referenced their docs directly, you might end up with a dozen, but in reality, you might be able to get away with as few as five.
These days, almost every website encourages visitors to share its pages on social media. We’ve all seen the ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter icons, among others, just begging to be clicked. This comes as no surprise as sharing via social media, the internet incarnation of word-of-mouth, is one of the most effective ways for businesses and individuals to gain awareness.
When users choose to share these links, it is tasked to the web developer to make sure that the associated web pages are properly prepared, which is what we’ll look at now. Facebook and Twitter are, by far, the most popular social media platforms, so let’s focus on those two.
Sharing on Facebook and Twitter
Facebook offers developers various options on how a shared web page appears in its timeline depending on the website’s content. Unless otherwise specified, every website defaults to the type called, appropriately, “website”, which is the example we’ll use.
Let’s say someone has shared the home page of a fictional travel company – Facebook displays it like this:
Facebook card
Twitter, as well, has multiple ways to format shared web pages that appear in its feed, but we’ll look at the one that’s quite similar to the above example from Facebook, which Twitter calls the “Summary Card with Large Image”:
Twitter card
As we can see, each features multiple attributes of the shared Web page:
a prominent image and title
a description
the domain name
Proprietary Tags
How do we specify these attributes? With tags. When a link is shared, both Facebook and Twitter scrape the associated web page and read its tags to display the appropriate information.
Facebook uses tags leveraging the Open Graph protocol, a classification system for Web pages that extends beyond those tags already defined in HTML5. A complete list of tags available can be found at the Open Graph Web site. There are so many from which to choose that it can be somewhat intimidating, but only four are actually required:
<meta property="og:title" content="European Travel Destinations">
<meta property="og:description" content="Offering tour packages for individuals or groups.">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/index.htm">
Twitter has its own tags that are similar to the Open Graph protocol, but uses the “twitter” prefix instead of “og”. As with Facebook, only a few are required. The type of display format we’re requesting from Twitter is also specified:
<meta name="twitter:title" content="European Travel Destinations ">
<meta name="twitter:description" content=" Offering tour packages for individuals or groups.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content=" http://euro-travel-example.com/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
Both Facebook and Twitter offer guidelines on how to use the above tags. They are quite similar to each other, although they can be somewhat subjective in interpretation. Note that, for our purposes, Facebook is referring to the shared Web page when using the term “object”:
Facebook
Twitter
Title
The title, headline or name of the object.
A concise title for the related content. [Maximum 70 characters.]
Description
A short description or summary of the object. [Between 2 and 4 sentences.]
A description that concisely summarizes the content as appropriate for presentation within a Tweet. You should not re-use the title as the description or use this field to describe the general services provided by the website. [Maximum 200 characters.]
Image
The URL of the image for your object. It should be at least 600×315 pixels, but 1200×630 or larger is preferred (up to 5MB). Stay close to a 1.91:1 aspect ratio to avoid cropping.
A URL to a unique image representing the content of the page. You should not use a generic image such as your website logo, author photo, or other image that spans multiple pages. Images for this Card should be at least 280px in width, and at least 150px in height. Image must be less than 1MB in size.
URL
The canonical URL for your page. This should be the undecorated URL, without session variables, user identifying parameters, or counters.
Since these proprietary tags are, in the end, referring to the same elements, it would be ideal if there were somehow a way to reconcile the two. Fortunately, there is.
Reconciling Tags
There’s no harm with having multiple tags that appear redundant. Too much information never hurt anyone except by adding a few extra bytes to the HTML file.
But for our purposes, and for the sake of brevity, we can leverage the fact that Twitter allows us to substitute Open Graph tags for its own. In the end, except for the necessity of specifying a display format, none of the custom Twitter tags are needed. This gives us the following, which could be considered the bare minimum of tags necessary to make a web page amenable for sharing on social media:
<meta property="og:title" content="European Travel Destinations">
<meta property="og:description" content="Offering tour packages for individuals or groups.">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/index.htm">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
Reconciling the guidelines for the image is simple: follow Facebook’s recommendation of a minimum dimension of 1200×630 pixels and an aspect ratio of 1.91:1, but adhere to Twitter’s file size requirement of less than 1MB.
Validating Tags
If there are any doubts about the legitimacy of paring down to these five tags, we can use the helpful Facebook Sharing Debugger and Twitter Card Validator. Both these tools will scrape any Web page hosted on a public server for relevant tags and display how it would look when shared. It will also list any errors and provide suggestions. So how did we do with our particular example? Twitter seems fine with things, but Facebook, on the other hand, lists one item as a warning:
Facebook warning
This provides a perfect segue to talk about…
Social Media Analytics
What Facebook is indicating is that if you’re going to use their analytics tool, which they call Domain Insights, you must provide the unique ID number associated with your account. The tag would then look something like this:
Twitter has something similar that they call Twitter Card Analytics. To get the most out of this tool, Twitter recommends using the following tag that contains the Twitter username that you want associated with the shared Web page:
Keep in mind, though, that if you have no particular interest in using these analytic tools, then omitting the above two tags has no effect on how a shared Web page appears on a Facebook timeline or Twitter feed.
Anything Else?
Facebook documentation recommends one additional tag, though it’s not required. A tag that denotes the name of the Web site in which the shared page resides:
Twitter suggests one other tag as well that is recommended, but not required:
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="Alt text for image">
This provides an alternative image description for those who are visually impaired.
Final Markup
That should do it. To reiterate, when you look at documentation from Facebook and Twitter for sharing Web pages, there are many other tags available that can be used to specify different types of content. But, in general, the following will suffice:
<!-- Essential META Tags -->
<meta property="og:title" content="European Travel Destinations">
<meta property="og:description" content="Offering tour packages for individuals or groups.">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://euro-travel-example.com/index.htm">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<!-- Non-Essential, But Recommended -->
<meta name="og:site_name" content="European Travel, Inc.">
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="Alt text for image">
<!-- Non-Essential, But Required for Analytics -->
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="your_app_id" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@website-username">
Everyone wants faster Internet access. But the speed has more to do with the bandwidth delivered by ISPs, cable companies and mobile operators. Web developers and designers also play a role in ensuring that there is minimal lag time when someone visits their websites. The growing number of images, videos and graphics on today’s websites are the biggest factors contributing to slow web load times. And, since developers are using more of these types of media, it’s important that they learn how to effectively manage images and videos to improve performance and the user experience. The Cloudinary image management and optimization solution alleviates these problems, helping developers create and deliver images as efficiently as possible, optimizing website load time. In this article, we’ll examine ways you can leverage Cloudinary to speed your sites performance.
Image Cloud Service Cloudinary
Choose an Efficient Image Format
One of the first decisions you will have to make is which image format is best suited for your site design. Aside from JPEG, PNG and GIF, you can choose from formats like WebP (supported by Google for Chrome browsers), and JPEG-XR (leveraged by Microsoft for Internet Explorer and Edge browsers) as well. Generally, developers are using JPEG for large-format, photographic images, while PNG or GIF are used for small-format, sketchier images. Most developers haven’t embraced these modern formats, and how they can help optimize site performance.
Fast Choice of Image Formats
Cloudinary enables you to quickly transform uploaded images into any format. You can convert images to the WebP and JPEG-XR modern formats, while also adjusting compression quality to balance between the formats. Cloudinary also helps detect the specific browser that accesses each image and deliver the optimal version of the image to the each browser, so you can achieve optimum visual quality with a minimal file size.
Define an Appropriate Size
Your website is, no doubt, being viewed on many different devices – from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets – and you’re developing a responsive layout to ensure your site can scale to fit each device. Often developers offer the same images across all devices and resolutions, using client-side resizing for the images. The images may look great, but visitors waste time loading unnecessarily large images to their devices and you pay for redundant bandwidth usage. This is particularly unfair to 3G and roaming users, who must pay more to download the larger images than needed. To avoid these issues, you should identify visitors’ mobile devices and resolution using their user agent and optionally additional client-side Javascript code.
Simple Scaling Via URL
Thanks to the “” element, and the “srcset” attribute, HTML5 gives you the option to address different layouts, or display and window sizes, as well as to distribute individual files. Cloudinary then helps by easily scaling your images to fit any device size or resolution.
Keep Pixel Density in Mind
Today’s mobile devices and laptops have high device pixel ratios (DPR). No doubt, you want your site to look great on these devices. But you may end up delivering the higher-resolution images to all users, even those with regular (non-Retina) displays. For those users with regular displays, downloading these double resolution images results in wasted time, waiting for pages to load, and significantly increases the amount – and cost – of bandwidth.
Defining Double Pixel Density via the URL Parameter “dpr_2.0.”
The combination of responsive web layout and different pixel densities often results in a rather large amount of different image files that need to be provided. Cloudinary enables you to create different resolutions for each DPR value, then automatically detect the DPR value of the web page in the current user’s browser. This feature will enable you to deliver regular images to users with regular displays and 2x resolution images to users with retina display devices.
Cache Images Correctly
With proper caching settings, you prevent loaded images from having to be loaded again. Via the header “Cache-Control,” you should set the longest possible period for which an image file will be cached in the browser. Cloudinary predefines a value that is equal to about 30 days.
Cache-Control: public, max-age=2591907
If the image file changes within the caching period, you should make sure to notify the browser of the modification, using the so-called “ETag.” This header field will transfer a hash value that changes as soon as the file on the server changes. As the “ETag” is always called up – even within the caching period – the browser will recognize that the file on the server has changed, due to the altered hash value, and download it.
ETag: "07c35c9716cf1702b22cda61526a0c5a"
Cloudinary creates an “ETag” for each resource, creating an optimal collaboration with “Cache-Control,” avoiding redundant downloads.
“Cache-Control” and “ETag” Header
Use Sprites and Avoid Too Many Requests
The image size is not the only thing that impacts website performance. The larger the amount of files that need to be downloaded, the slower the site’s speed. Every file and every request takes time and extends page load time, so, when using many small images, the best practice is to include all of them in a single image file. For example, you can place all logos used on a page in a PNG file, and create a so-called CSS sprite. Below, the CSS sprite is used to only display a crop of an image file.
Fast Creation of Sprites
With Cloudinary, creating CSS sprites is quick and easy. You can simply upload all logos or image files that you want to combine in one sprite, and assign an identical tag, such as “logo,” to each of them. Then you can call up the URL – “http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/sprite/logo.png.” The assigned tag will be used as the filename, and the file ending will be your chosen image format. Cloudinary automatically creates an image file that contains all the uploaded files with the same tag. With the URL, you can receive the suitable CSS file in which the respective image crop is defined for all logos.
Use a Content Delivery Network
Aside from image optimization and compression, appropriate caching, and the prevention of too many requests, there’s another crucial aspect that can cause long loading times: the server itself. Standard providers usually only have one server location and are not prepared for the fast delivery of large amounts of data to locations around the globe. Content delivery networks CDNs, however, typically have servers strategically deployed around the world to shorten content delivery times. CDNs enable images to be served more quickly to users and reduce the likelihood of crashes, enhance SEO performance, and improve the user experience. When you are choosing a CDN, you will need to consider its level of global coverage, the caching rate, ability to run logical operations at the edge, average response times, and other metrics, such as average invalidation times.
Cloudinary images are delivered via multiple worldwide CDN’s including Akamai, assuring that images are transferred quickly, wherever they are needed.
Conclusion
If you want your website to be fast, so that users are satisfied with performance and bandwidth usage and costs are minimized, you need to better manage and optimize the images and videos on your site. There are many factors to consider, as we’ve outline above. Cloudinary can help in a variety of aspects, providing the tools to automate the process of image management and transformation, while delivering optimal website performance. To learn more, visit www.cloudinary.com.
The ultimate goal of e-commerce websites is to get the conversion. Even leading e-commerce sites work for the same goal. And for the accomplishment of the goal, it is essential to include the leading e-commerce website designs that are in the trend now. We have chosen some of the most trending e-commerce website designs for
In this month’s edition of what’s new for designers and developers, we’ve included new apps, JavaScript libraries, mobile dev tools, graphic design apps, blogging platforms, CSS frameworks, color resources, productivity tools, and much more. And as always, we’ve also included some awesome new free fonts!
Almost everything on the list this month is free, with a few high-value paid apps and tools also included. They’re sure to be useful to designers and developers, from beginners to experts.
If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman to be considered!
Proud
Proud is a time management app (iOS and Mac) made just for busy people. It acts like an external brain for your ideas and thoughts to help you remember what’s important.
Perma
Perma is a productivity app for teams or individuals. It has tools for planning and organizing, collaboration, discussion, and more.
Picnic CSS
Picnic CSS gives your native HTML elements a boost so that you don’t have to mix your presentation classes with your HTML. It’s entirely modular so that each part can be easily modified and tested.
Mega Boilerplate
Mega Boilerplate is a set of handcrafted starter projects that are all optimized for ease of use and simplicity. It can be used with Node.js, static HTML5 sites, Electron, and more.
Real Time Users
Real Time Users lets you add a real time user counter to your site in under a minute. You can have it displayed plain or styled.
Bench
Bench is an easy to use collaboration tool for teams. All anyone needs to join a meeting is a secret link. There are free and paid accounts.
Smock
Smock lets you mockup and emulate a website on a mobile device.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark makes it simple to turn your ideas into social graphics, web stories, and animated videos, in just minutes.
Color Schemr
Color Schemr is a color palette generator that lets you create palettes, adjust opacity, preview how colors would look on a minimalist template, and more.
Colicious
Colicious is a great tool for finding colors to use on your next project. Just hit the space bar or click the screen to get a new color.
Illustrio
Illustrio is a library of customizable images for non-designers. You can customize the colors, text, and data for each one.
Pills
Pills is a tiny, responsive CSS grid. It’s mobile-first, uses the HTML5 Boilerplate head, and works with all modern browsers.
React D3 Library
The React D3 Library lets developers use D3 in React. It’s flexible, can be used with templates, and more.
Nicely Done
Nicely Done is a gallery of digital product inspiration. View by most popular, or by tags and categories.
Elementor
Elementor is a drag and drop live page builder for WordPress. It allows you to reach a whole new level of design with your WordPress pages.
Kickresume
Kickresume helps you create an outstanding résumé and cover letter in just minutes. It was created by designers, but approved by recruiters.
New VSCO
The New VSCO has a new design, with a seamless experience between editing and publishing, as well as more community features.
Hillo
If you use Trello, then you’ll want to check out Hillo. It lets you track all of the acitivty on your Trello boards at a glance.
Holmes
Holmes gives you fast and easy search inside a page. Search results are returned in real-time as you type.
Proppy
Proppy gives you beautiful, interactive proposals in an instant. It helps you stay organized, collaborate with others, and more.
Cucumbertown
Cucumbertown is a free food blog platform that allows you to unleash your creativity with simple recipe creation tools and more.
Dopamine
Dopamine offers a Reinforcement API that helps you hack user engagement and retention. You can deploy it for free in just minutes.
Messaging Design Kit
This Messaging Design Kit from Layer contains everything you need to create beautiful and functional rich messaging experiences.
TypeNetwork
TypeNetwork is a new model for type designers to develop, license, and use their typeface designs. It’s mission is to find and support the best type and publish it for the best designers.
Universal.css
Universal.css gives you all the CSS features you could need: self-documented class names, zero dependencies, no need for a CSS preprocessor, and more.
Family.scss
Family.scss is a set of smart Sass mixins that help you manage the style of :nth-child elements.
Cutestrap
Cutestrap is a sassy, opinionated CSS framework, a tiny alternative to Bootstrap.
Discover.typography
Discover.typography is a collection of typographic inspiration from the designers at H&Co.
PixelSquid
PixelSquid is a powerful image library that lets you introduce 3D into your design workflow. You can download images as layered PSDs or transparent PNGs, or even use their Photoshop plugin.
Checkbox.css
Checkbox.css is a tiny set of CSS3 animations for your checkboxes.
CreateBrief.com
CreateBrief.com is an easy to use design brief template generator. Just answer the questions to create your brief, no sign up required.
Butler
Butler is a very readable serif typeface that comes with 14 different weights.
Star Full Inline
The Star Full Inline Font comes in a bold version for free (there are 7 other font versions available for sale).
Shelby Inline
Shelby Inline is a free inline font with rounded edges and a vintage feel.
Black Mask
Black Mask is a vintage-inspired all caps display font with a press style and texture throughout.
Bernier
Bernier is a free font that comes in three different formats: regular, shade, and distressed.
When launching an app, you need to spend a lot of time and resources to attract users. You can pull people into your app using a variety of means, including advertising, referral programs, public relations and content marketing. But when people finally download an app, they sometimes feel abandoned. You must clearly show users why they need your app.
Studies reveal that 90% of all downloaded apps are used only once and then eventually deleted by users. People often abandon apps because of a poorly designed interface or an overall negative experience. Instead of having their problem solved by the app, people get confused trying to wade through a jungle of screens, menus and buttons.
This month, we’ll continue our popular series with the newest, most beautiful themes. Once again, I took a deep dive into the official WordPress theme index, to find ten pretty free WordPress themes for you so that you can give your website a fresh, new look.
Orvis is a new theme by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It’s meant to be used as a portfolio, or a restaurant/food theme, and presents photos in an appealing way. It comes with adjustable colors and predefined color schemes, and on top of that, it also offers a custom logo. The portfolio can be displayed anywhere using shortcodes.
Created by: Automattic
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
Tora is an elegant, fresh business theme. It can be customized individually and offers a lot of options at that. Adjust the colors, the background, the landing page, and a lot more. There are predefined layouts as well, allowing for a fast start.
Created by: vladff
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
In my opinion, the EasyMag theme is one of the most beautiful magazine and news themes for WordPress. The division of the landing page is very clear and covers all areas. Logo, colors, and six predefined layouts can be set.
Created by: Daisy Themes
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
Bhumi is a theme for a broad range of applications. You can use it to build both personal blogs, and business or portfolio websites. Colors and backgrounds are adjustable. Bhumi comes with a couple of unique widgets as well. The theme is prepared for usage with WooCommerce.
Created by: Utsav Singh Rathour
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
This theme was developed for design agencies, web designers, freelancers, and all types of business websites. A portfolio area is given as well, and designers or photographers can also present their work. Logos, colors, and background are adjustable.
Created by: SKT Themes
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
Easy Blog is a classic blogging theme. The SEO-friendly theme can be customized regarding color, and a custom logo can also be uploaded. Your favorite social networks can be displayed, and there are predefined spots for advertisements.
Created by: Daisy Themes
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
SEO Press is more of a development base for fast, and search engine optimized websites. The theme offers a couple of options such as adjusting the colors, font size, fonts, and so forth.
Created by: Rinku Y
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
Pashmina is the right theme for fashion blogs. Color options, a slider, and a lot of other settings allow you to adjust your theme to your wishes. However, thanks to the color options, the theme can also work for other industries.
Created by: Daisy Themes
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
IsleMag is a new and fresh magazine and news theme by Themeisle. Logo, colors, background images, as well as social media links can be edited. You can also adjust the front page to meet your desires.
Created by: Codeinwp
License: Free for personal and commercial use | GNU General Public License
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
How to not Work
Google Fonts
10 Reasons Placeholders are Problematic
50 Best Fonts for Website Headings
Infinite Scrolling Best Practices
NYC Gets a Major Rebrand (And its First Official Pictograms)
20 Common Typography Mistakes
Dark Mode is Finally Coming to iOS
Baseline Rhythm in CSS
Google.com Testing New Design
Apple UX Goes Full Dadcore
How to Create Memorable Micro-Moments
Font Pairing When Working for an Agency
7 Best Apps for Remote Designers
MacOS Sierra: What Can your Mac do Now? Just Ask.
What is Google’s Project Tango, and Why Should You Care?
iOS 10 Human Interface Guidelines
The Real Reason Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn
The Material Re-Design of Google Play that will Blow your Mind
Knozen for Business: Get Fascinating Personality Reports for your Users
KarmaCircles: Free Advice from 4000+ Experts
Buffer to Layoff 10% of its Workforce
CO: Automate your Freelance Business
Portland Designer Makes 53 Different Oregon Park Badges
When it’s Time to Pull the Plug on a Startup
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Summer! It’s been too long since I chronicle’d at ya. You know, where I chitchat about what’s been going on in life, around here, and on my other projects.
A big new thing here on CSS-Tricks is the email newsletter. We thought it would be a more compelling read if we hand-crafted it each week rather than just spitting out an RSS feed into an email. Robin Rendle has been largely heading that up, but we all contribute.
There is no web archive of it yet! So if you wanna read it, you gotta subscribe. There is a subscription form on this page. We experiment with the format a little bit each week.
We put a new feature into the Forums as well: live preview of new posts. You can always edit your posts/replies on the forums as well, but it’s nice to have that live preview tab to see how things are going to be before you publish. We have live preview in the comments here on the blog, so it’s nice to have that feature in the forums now as well.
The last five screencasts have been “pairing” style, where it’s one person teaching another person something. I put one out not so long ago. I’d like to do more, but admittedly don’t have much planned right now. Wanna do one with me? You should teach me something! Get in touch.
I’ve been keeping my speaking schedule pretty light on purpose. Takin’ a little break from that. I do have one talk coming up this fall though: An Event Apart Orlando which is October 3-5. It’s their bigger special edition version. I’ll be putting together a new talk around SVG I’m calling 10 Things You Can and Should Do With SVG.
While I’m not speaking, I am going to be at a number of upcoming conferences, doing other types of things.
June 23-24, Web Design Day, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Live ShopTalk Show!
October 17-19, 2016, CSS Dev Conf, San Antonio, Texas – CodePen Show & Tell!
October 26-29, 2016, Made By Few 2016, Bentonville, Arkansas – Hosting the Fireside Chats!
I’ve been spending most of my time working on CodePen. We’ve been cranking on a number of big projects. Some internal that you likely won’t notice, some huge new things you will definitely notice. I can’t say more yet, but stay tuned.
We haven’t stopped development elsewhere just for these big new things though. In fact, we just had a record streak (6 weeks!) where we publishedsomething new every work day. The biggest stuff? PRO Perks, Embeds v2, and a new Details View, along with largely keeping up on bugs, updates, support, and security stuff.
CodePen Meetups have been huge too. We’re slated to have record numbers of them going on around the world this summer. Lots of new ones in new cities. That’s partially due to us having new partnerships with meetup sponsors who can help pay for things at the meetups. We made a page to explain what it’s like to host a meetup. If you’ve ever thought about it, check that page out.
We’re also coming up on 100 episodes of CodePen Radio! Woot!
Over in ShopTalk land, we’ve been doing a lot of double-guest episodes. I think we’ve done about 10 of them and I’m really liking them. More brains, wider perspective, more topical.
I’m very much looking forward to doing a live show at Web Design Day with Dave next week! We could use some questions from the audience, if you’re gonna be there.
I’ve also realized lately that some of my favorite episodes are when just Dave and I get to chat. I don’t get to see Dave as much as I’d like, so getting to chat with him on the show is my only pittance. Maybe we’ll do a whole season of Dave and I.
Life! Now that the weather has been good here in Milwaukee, lots has been going on. Camping, for example. I’m publishing this post from a camping chair at sunrise. There has been landscaping work on the house, gardening, running, crossfitt… I started writing it all up here, then figured it’s best for my personal blog.
Let’s see. What else. Oh yeah I have a book coming out! Sooooooon.
