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as Note I stumbled over the event just two weeks ago. The TEDx Munich 2015 which had the title “Hidden Treasures”. Until now, I only have known TED talks from videos and I have seen extraordinarily great ones over the past years. Curious but knowing how much TED Events cost, I read that the independently organized Munich event was only 140EUR for the ticket. Not knowing a single speaker made me to … -
as Note A few months ago I finally implemented Stripe as donation platform for WDRL with the help of my friend Tobias Tom. This is a short story on how it turned out to be an awful experience. I already started an attempt to implement Stripe when they released their cool checkout.js product. What I didn’t realize back then, and only found out by accident, is that while it’s super easy to implement the …Notes on Stripe
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as Article I recently researched font loading again as I wanted to use a local copy of a font and serve it as fast and smooth as possible. This is a quite different approach to when you use TypeKit or Google fonts and their simple copy/paste snippets… Over the past months there have been a few articles taking care of different font loading optimization techniques. Reading all of them, I ran into a few other …<strong>Using Web Fonts</strong> The Best Way (in 2015).
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as Article We all know the discussions about Apple’s Safari browser. And while the one party is saying “it’s the new Internet Explorer”, others counter state “it’s the user centric web”. I don’t fully agree with both parties. It’s the new IE Well, I can’t say that sentence is entirely wrong. With Apple’s engineers hiding all their development from the public and several occurrences where Apple invents their …Safari isn’t the new IE but it’s also not user centric
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as Article Today I switched my website from GitHub Pages and Cloudflare back to my own servers. It wasn’t that hard but there are also some drawbacks I want to report. Reasons for Switching It’s super easy to set up github pages and as they have ruby installed it’s even easier to run your Jekyll based site on it. You can also add custom domains to it which I did. At some point in the past years I wanted to …Performance is King but so is Privacy and Data Ownership
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as Article Usually I am the one who says ‘Let the developer change every default browser behaviour’. Except, there are behaviours that, when customised, can hurt the user’s experience more than a custom behaviour could help. Such a case is custom scrolling. In the past week I visited a lot of different websites. Not the usual web development websites that I visit all the time but very different normal …Native Scrolling
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as Article Lately, WDRL for me has not only been a way to curate and share the best links in web development but also a way to write things that are important for me. It’s a great feeling when I send out my thoughts on the list (usually in the introduction) and get heart-warming replies from my readers. What started out as a simple bullet point list on my blog now is a hand written letter with still some …A Channel To Write.
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as Article It’s cool to be trendy and it’s cool to bash other people and products. Wait, what? It isn’t cool to harass people, it isn’t cool to fight with other persons. We need to be smarter in the ways we communicate with each other. Today showed it again. Addendum / Note: I’m not on either side in the following example. It just shows a hopefully neutral view on how different persons deal with others. …Don’t fight but start supporting each other
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as Article I always read W3C or WHATWG bashings. I even wrote one myself. I’m (better should say was as I’m not very active at the moment) part of the RICG, a movement that tried and successfully managed to get the first developer based need into an official webstandard. And the RICG started because W3C and WHATWG failed to understand our needs. Note: The following paragraphs are my opinion and my …Lessons learned pushing a new webstandard and how important it is to stay classy.
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as Article 2014 is over now and as in the past year I want to recap the past year and reflect what happened. Note: This is a personal article and there’s at least no technical take away in here. 2014 started with a big change. In December 2013 I said ‘yes’ to my biggest project yet in my career and I started January, 6th, in my new team. This included moving from Munich to Cologne for what I thought would …My 2014 in recap
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as Article I recently questioned myself a lot how to grow WDRL and make this non-profit side project a bit more sustainable. At the end of 2014, 1 ½ years after its foundation I want to share a little bit more about it. But first, I want to thank all my supporters, readers and all the people who wrote the stuff I’m linking to each week. You’re all amazing! I wanted to change something A few months …Towards a more sustainable WDRL
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as Article I recently made an improvement to WDRL’s website and wanted to integrate a pie chart. It was clear to use SVG here but as I use variable data I wanted to do this via JavaScript. There are tons of chart libraries but I was curious to find a small solution that works fine for just one or two charts on a site. Interestingly, people always share jQuery plugins, huge chart libraries if you ask them …Add a single SVG Chart to your Page
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as Article You might already have noticed some changes when visiting my website. I enabled HTTPS/SSL via Cloudflare and MaxCDN. With that you’re now also getting this site served through SPDY / HTTP/2. Preparations Nearly none. Except you need to change your nameservers to Cloudflare nameservers so they can handle your requests. This can take up to 48hrs to be distributed to the nameservers over the world. …SSL
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as Article Do you write @media screen into your media query? Stop it. It limits you more than it usually helps. If you have a look at this example: @media only screen (min-width: 43em) { /* Your CSS here */ } This of course will work on your smartphone, tablet and desktop as expected. But if won’t apply if you, for example, print the page. Because you’ve limited the query to only apply to screen. Did you …Quick Trick: Responsive Print Media Queries
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as Moment In my vacation in early August, 2014, and my brother went hiking in the mountains for two days. The first ascent was to our first night quartier, the Soiernhaus near Mittenwald, Germany. This was an enjoyable, three hours hike with around 1000m difference in altitude. When we arrived at the alpine hut we drank a fresh buttermilk first, ate a Kaiserschmarrn and then chilled in the sun at the lake …Hiking to the Soiernspitze
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as Article How do you colorize a video in the very same colors you use in your webdesign? Of course, in CSS. Now what do you do if you have different colors and want them to be reflected in your video? Yes, you animate it. Caution: The following technique is a proof-of-concept that might have a heavy impact on your CPU & GPU. Please do not ever use this technique in real / client projects until the …Dynamically colorize videos with CSS
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as Article Nearly three years after the initial request for a native responsive images solution in HTML, <picture>, srcset and sizes finally are officially a web standard. Both, WHATWG and W3C landed patches in the past week including the <picture> element and its attributes to the HTML5 specification. And here are the specifications for each on WHATWG and W3C sites: WHATWG <picture> …A Webstandard It Is…
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as Article Exciting news have been coming up this week. Responsive Images are finally being implemented. Chrome is offering <picture> in version 37 behind flags, which means it’s in Canary since this week and hopefully in released stable v37 in August, 2014. Firefox has all the patches nearly finished and will ship soon in Nightly channel. Long awaited, discussed over the past three years, a …Responsive Images In Your Browser
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as Article In a large-scale ongoing component-driven front-end project it is likely that you’ll encounter regression bugs. This is the point where you should consider adding regression tests. I want to show you how to test your layout using PhantomCSS (a tool using CasperJS (1.1) and PhantomJS to make screenshots and compare them) and even emulate CSS states. See how to set up and configure PhantomCSS in …Testing mouse events and CSS states with PhantomCSS
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as Article Using GitHub pages is common practice today, especially using it as host for your Open Source project’s website. But also, websites like mine, rely on GitHub’s pages service. But recently I stumbled over a little caveat—which helps GitHub to prevent attacks. Please be aware this post is written as of April, 2014 and things might have changed when you read this post. You find the links with the …Analyzing the GitHub Pages Waterfall Chart
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