I recently had a use case where CMS provided headlines needed to reasonably fit into a well defined space within a hero section. The hope was to fill that space a bit better by using larger font sizes for short headlines, and smaller sizes for longer ones, all based on character length. The Result Putting the end result up here at the top because I know you’re pressed for time and just want Something That Works™️ See the Pen Length-dependent Font Size by Steve Woodson (@stevenwoodson) on CodePen. The part you want to copy is the JavaScript, the CSS is mostly just for illustrative purposes as ..read more

Hat tip to all the other digital accessibility focused folks out there, fighting the good fight to advocate, educate, and drive accessibility forward. This post is my little contribution to the rallying cry of doing everything we can to push digital accessibility and equal access forward. This is coming from my perspective as a web developer so these tips are going to skew pretty heavily in that direction, but I’m hopeful they give you ideas for your own unique situation. Sometimes, all we need is to give ourselves permission to just do it anyway. It’s hard out there The difficulty of accessi ..read more

I keep hearing great things about Astro, and just so happened to have a personal project that I needed to move off of Nuxt 2 as its end of life date is rapidly approaching. Here’s my journey from never using Astro to pushing the refactored codebase live. Luckily, there’s a handy Nuxt to Astro migration guide that I’ll be using to get started. Initial Setup Install Thanks Astro installer for the reminder that I’m on an embarrassingly old version of Node. Got the new shiny Node LTS version 20.9.0 installed and ready to roll. Little attention to detail things like this really goes a long way! Fi ..read more

As a freelance web dev consultant, I’ve been having a whole lot of introductory conversations. They generally fit in one of a few categories: potential clients looking for a developer for an upcoming project fellow consultants looking for a dev to join them on a project someone for either of the previous two groups that don’t yet have something specific in mind, but want to find potential consultants for work they’re trying to get started soon. One big question I always ask all of them is “What’s your budget?”. As you might expect, this is also one of the hardest questions to get answered ..read more

I’ve recently been jumping into learning more about Astro, using a personal project that needs to be replatformed as an excuse to give it a try. The first thing I wanted to dive into and learn more about was how components are handled, and especially how well it plays with browser native Web Components. I burned a lot of time here just trying to understand how a web component could be copied into an Astro project. So instead of waiting to blog about the whole process, I wanted to share my learnings about components separately first. First Attempt – AstroHeart My first attempt was to get the A ..read more

I received some great feedback from a recent social media post (on LinkedIn and Mastodon) about my sometimes unhealthy obsession with my todo list, I’m glad it resonated with so many people! It’s been a topic on my mind all year, though the nature of my fixation has shifted over the past 6 months – especially as I transitioned from a full time job into freelance – the underlying basics remain the same. After diving into the subject a little deeper I came to find out about the term Toxic Productivity which sums it up pretty well. There are other related terms like “action bias” and “hustle cul ..read more

Preamble I’ve been working on this recap in bits and pieces since the State of the Browser conference in September. Now that it’s already mid-October I’m happy to finally be able to share my lightly edited notes from each of the speaker sessions. I also added a “More Background” section at the end that gets into more detail about how a guy from the Midwest ended up sponsoring and attending a conference in London. SotB Sessions Michael R. Lorek – “Web Standards: Does Anyone Actually Care?” Validate your code, test for accessibility, pen test it – it all contributes towards the resilience ..read more

Happy to say I recently checked off a pretty large goal off my list by achieving my CPACC certification! I sat for the exam in early February 2022 and received notification of my passing it early in March. Preparation I participated in a CPACC study cohort at work, four of us worked through the IAAP CPACC Certification Preparation Course course together. I took fairly detailed bulleted notes that I referred back to often. The course is well organized and I got a lot of great detail out of it. Prior to the cohort I had purchased a year-long license to that course twice and had troub ..read more

I wrote an earlier post called “Improving Your Emotional Intelligence,” which introduced the topic of soft skills and practical advice on how to incorporate those skills into your life in measurable ways. In this second installment of soft-skills topics, we’ll explore some practical, high-level productivity techniques including the methodologies from “Getting Things Done,” “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and “Measure What Matters.” With an initial investment in organization and goal setting, you can then focus on small periodic routines that help you improve daily productivity ..read more

Who doesn’t want to make a difference in other people’s lives while also maintaining productivity? Proven soft skill techniques can make this seemingly impossible feat a reality! The term “Soft Skills” covers a broad spectrum of topics in interpersonal, communication, leadership, and personal skills. These are arguably the most important skills for your career, but by definition, they are also difficult to measure. This is the first in a series of articles meant to introduce you to some soft skill topics, providing some background information and practical advice on how to incorporate it into ..read more