Notes

Notes on Web Development

269 notes

Jul 2026

May 2026

Apr 2026

Mar 2026

Feb 2026

I love Hacker News. But it's ugly.

So I built Zen HN—a Chrome extension with dark mode, custom themes, better typography, and keyboard-driven navigation.

solomon.io

Jun 2020

Jun 2019

I don't understand why some websites limit passwords to 20 characters?

Mar 2019

Oct 2018

The last couple of weeks I've been playing around with @discourse. I decided to put together a little guide on getting the community up an running on @digitalocean. If you're interested in starting a community, it may be worth a look. solomon.io

Sep 2018

@erlend_sh @discourse I'm sure you will! I've been lurking there the last couple of day or two going through DO and mail server setup. Tons of useful comments.

Think my next project might be wrangling together a @discourse theme. Are there any other open source forum/news boards I should look into?

Aug 2018

Excited for @WordPress's Gutenberg layout editor. My theme doesn't support it now, but it should provide a ton of flexibility going forward. No more shortcode hacks for layout changes.

Jul 2018

Unfortunately, Trustfuel Jobs is no longer maintained. However, here are a few thoughts for anyone considering building a job board. From the archives... solomon.io

Apr 2018

So, I've been doing local WordPress development using MAMP forever. Trying out @HeyFlywheel's Local for a new project. Very happy with it thus far.

I love all the quirky renders on @toggl's homepage. Especially the eye that follows your mouse in the "Follow the Money" section. toggl.com

Feb 2018

Talk about attention to detail...

Benjamin De Cock@bdc

Fun fact about stripe.com : while the hero image is loading, the header displays an inline SVG illustration blurred with a CSS filter ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Flat vector illustration of mountains and a lake at dusk in blue and copper tones
Browser dev tools showing the inline SVG markup behind Stripe's hero with path fills and a sky gradient
View post (opens X)

Dec 2017

Nov 2017

Oct 2017

Sep 2017

I hate when websites use cursors inappropriately and use too many different cursors on a page. This site does both. colorz.fr

Jul 2017

The moving elements are a little distracting, but I love the use of layers for section breaks on this site! qonto.com

Jun 2017

May 2017

Apr 2017

Mar 2017

I could probably limit the number of classes generated, but that may mean undoing some of my existing work. Well, now I know.

Feb 2017

New website concept is coming together. Copy still needs some work.

Since the upgrade to Mac OS Sierra is sass --watch has been killing my CPU. Anyone else experience this issue?

Dec 2016

Nov 2016

Oct 2016

Sep 2016

Had a couple free days to update the trustfuel.com website. It's still a child theme, but a little work goes a long way.

Forgetting to translate class to className in react continues to cause issues.

Aug 2016

Jul 2016

Just got to explain to an intern that circles on the internet are actually squares with a border-radius.

May 2016

On the internet, a circle is just a square with a large border radius.

Not generally a fan of the overly animated portfolios, but this skull-thing is rad. eli.wtf

Mar 2016

There's so much astroturf behind all these "95 Best WordPress Themes of 2016" posts on Designer News this morning.

Not sure I've ever said this about a website, but the sound design on this KLM site is incredible. ifly50.com

For something visually simple, styling checkboxes is a pain in the ass.

My only real gripe with Wikipedia is that there are no max-widths. Making those paragraphs a little narrower would improve readability.

Feb 2016

Why Bother Making Beautiful Team Pages? It shows companies care about their employees. buff.ly

Jan 2016

I'm all for mailto links, but they shouldn't be used in buttons. They should only be used with linked text email addresses

Dec 2015

Nov 2015

Designer friends, how do you feel about designing in the browser?

So is there no way to center text on a select element using CSS? Ridiculous.

Anybody out there have experience preventing duplicate accounts from being created, when implementing social login?

Oct 2015

Well, I'm glad somebody is inspired by my work. My resume builder to the left, copy to the right.

Sep 2015

Trying to build a Chrome extension—I have no idea what I'm doing.

Aug 2015

Interesting to see flexbox making an appearance in Bootstrap 4. Maybe it's time?

Some of my CSS class names need work sm-full-width-center isn't great.

Jul 2015

Designers, what are some homepages you like for a consumer-focused tech company?

looking for homepage inspiration from other consumer tech companies @snapchat interestingly is just a ghost.

The navigation is a bit confusing, but the presentation is spectacular—Going home to inner Mongolia. jack.ventures

Jun 2015

Still can't get over the design of this site—great typography and punchy copy.

May 2015

Q: Is the iframe going to be seamless?
A: Well, as seamless as an iframe can be.

The Manchester City website has an accessibility page, which lets users change background colors, font sizes. buff.ly

If you're questioning whether you should build a forum or newsboard with a wordpress theme or telescope, definitely go with Telescope.

Will Microsoft release IE Edge for Mac? I hope so. It sure will make testing much easier.

Apr 2015

I'm frustrated with these tabs that contain a bunch of forms. Markup is getting sloppy.

Typekit just told me the font requests are slow because of the complexity of my CSS. Is that possible?

Mar 2015

I've spent the last hour trying to figure out why my classes aren't working on this website—apparently I wasn't running sass watch...

It's probably time to consider a new CMS when it's faster to add a link in the source than through the CMS editor.

Think you're site is too big for WordPress? WIRED just merged 100k posts, 12 databases, and 17 blogs into 1 install. wired.com

Feb 2015

The more I build, the more I realize that I need to refactor this CSS.

Jan 2015

table, td, tr, table, td, tr—my life building email templates.

Dec 2014

Web is a much more interesting space than mobile. Someone please explain to me why I'm wrong.

Someone has been trying to brute force advertisers.io. If you have a WordPress site Limit Login Attempts is a must.

So @AdblockPlus is blocking stylesheets for Advertisers.io because "advertise" is in the path. I hope changing the theme name will fix it.

Nov 2014

Oct 2014

I just saw an "Xfiniti Wifi is Better than 3G" animation appear while on my site. @Comcast are you injecting your own code into my browser?

I just realized Wikiwand changes the URL. I thought the extension just updated the stylesheet. Wonder how much this has played into growth?

Sep 2014

I may be in the minority, but I don't have much interest in native mobile apps. Huge negatives from the consumer, business and dev side.

This site is among the best media sites, I've seen. The attention to detail is incredible—Warsaw Rising 1944 warsawrising.eu

Not sure that this is a good idea. On the other hand it could help non-technical designers prototype—uilang github.com

OK, CentOS is installed and secure. MySQL, PHP and nginx to go.

Aug 2014

All of this server config stuff makes me feel like I'm in Edge of Tomorrow. Each time I get a little farther, then I screw up and restart.

Jul 2014

Talk about impactful copy. I'm throwing money at my screen but nothing is happening.

Interesting, Mailchimp checks for bot signups by placing a form field 5,000px offscreen. If it is submitted, then a bot filled it out.

Jun 2014

How did I not know about CSS font-feature-settings? This is incredible!

So this is hexadecimal clock is extremely clever. Additionally you can add transition: background 1s linear; to fade jacopocolo.com

Browsing Shopify themes for a client makes me want to open my own ecommerce store. Now I just need something to sell...

May 2014

Apr 2014

Looking for a freelance Frontend/WordPress developer to work with us on a new casino site. Anybody interested, or know anybody who would be?

Big news, Chrome 34 is stable, which now means serving retina images through srcset in HTML is viable. webkit.org

Mar 2014

I applaud this man's appreciation for web typography and dedication to the craft of frontend development, but wow. buff.ly

Now I can read the interwebs twice as fast! OpenSpritz, A Free Speed Reading Bookmarklet. gun.io

Feb 2014

That moment when 600 words mysteriously vanish from a WordPress post. Nothing in the revisions files. Anybody have a similar issue?

Browser caching seems to be helping. My site hasn't crashed under reddit's load.

I should have added browser caching to my site earlier.

Check out how A List Apart shows ads. It appears to be a modal, but is actually part of the page. I bet this converts

Are you the type of person that checks to see if a every website is responsive ? Then wanker.js might be for you mig.io

Jan 2014

Why does Microsoft stick with IE's name? They'll never get developers to support anything called Internet Explorer.

Trying to push new code to my site and the internet keeps going down. Live dangerously.

Dec 2013

They were clinging to Adobe Flash like those guys who still wear trucker hats... hahaha.

Mobile-first design is taking a small screen and making it better, as opposed to taking a big screen and making it worse. -@lukew #aeasf

As the capabilities of the web grows, so does it complexity. Abstraction allows us to battle complexity. - @chriscoyier #aeasf

Don't build separate mobile websites. Don't fork your content. It's not a strategy if you can't maintain it. #aeasf

All users are non-JavaScript users while they are downloading your webpage. #aeasf

Start with the smallest part of your design and build out from there. - @beep #aeasf

"Carousels exist on websites to prevent people from beating the shit out of others in meetings." #aeasf2013

Anybody going to be at An Event Apart in SF this week?

Nov 2013

Didn't get as far as I wanted tonight, but signaltower.co does have an updated home page.

OK, this is the point where I decide to finish my new home page or go to bed.

Anybody have success changing their wordpress blog's permalink structure to %postname% ? Keep getting 404s with the redirects in my htaccess

@rickknudtson Thanks for the follow Rick! Flywheel seems interesting, especially free migrations. Would you be open to doing an interview?

Oct 2013

If you give a client free reign over the beautiful site you built for them, they will destroy it. Lesson learned.

...Or if you are a developer and want to team up with a designer/frontend dev on a side project, let me know!

Sep 2013

Kentico CMS goes down as one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. No regard for the user. Simple tasks are extremely laborious.

How is it possible that a CMS can come without automatic spell checking? The proofreaders are going to be unhappy with me this morning.

Few things destroy a beautiful website more than adding a collection of logos to a page.

Best bug ticket ever-we no longer serve chicken fingers. Please remove this from the menu.

The problem with HTML5 is the lack of legacy support for tags. I'd love to use <section> without the site breaking in older browsers.

I've been seeing the image zoom on hover effect a lot lately. Generally, I'm hesitant about new UI ideas—this time may be different.

Aug 2013

Designer friends—what are some reasons not to have a twitter stream on a homepage?

Jul 2013

Incredibly impressed with the Umbraco CMS. It isn't as pretty as WordPress, but blows other .NET systems away.

Microsoft announced IE11? You would think after a decade of Hell for developers, they would change the name. I'm thinking a sea-faring bird.

Jun 2013

Choosing @GoDaddy for hosting continues to be one of the biggest mistakes I've made — downtime and 500 server errors every week.

Godlike design — Play a bear in 3d Pong. (Requires Chrome)

Interesting button styles. Especially the green section (click the order truck). But some of them feel over-the-top. tympanus.net

Apr 2013

After that GoDaddy host comment I have a bunch of hosting providers sending me requests on LinkedIn -- Interesting.

My @GoDaddy hosting has been down for more than an hour now. I have huge downtime every week. I wont be renewing.

Need to test your layouts on different mobile devices? Go to Best Buy and test them.

Mar 2013

Feb 2013

Does anyone know of an online tool to test websites on mobile browsers?

Twitter Bootstrap has come a long way when the top complaint is a curse word in the documentation.

I just realized how much I have to learn about icon fonts.

Jan 2013

This guy is going to have the best looking SCUBA diving site on the internet.

Dec 2012

Nov 2012

The more I learn about #RubyonRails the more I start to understand why CSS works.

Oct 2012

Aug 2012

Jul 2012

Ok, I'm officially hooked. If you aren't using @unbounce to test web layouts, you aren't doing it right.

Oct 2011

Nov 2010

Oct 2010