Blog
Articles about web development, design, performance, and related topics. Subscribe via RSS to keep up with new articles, or browse by topic.
- What Google Search Console Is Actually Useful For
Google Search Console shows how Google crawls, indexes, and presents your site, along with the queries and pages producing search traffic.
- Mastodon Is a Network, Not One Social Website
Mastodon is a network of independently run social servers. Here is how federation, timelines, moderation, and choosing a server work.
- Improving Core Web Vitals Without Chasing a Perfect Score
Improve Core Web Vitals by fixing slow main content, delayed interactions, and unexpected layout shifts with field data as the guide.
- Figma vs Sketch: The Workflow Matters More Than the Feature List
Compare Figma and Sketch by platform support, collaboration, files, prototyping, plugins, and the workflow your team already uses.
- Eleventy vs Hugo: Which One Fits Your Workflow?
Eleventy and Hugo both build good static sites, but their languages, templates, and built-in features suit different workflows.
- What a Static Site Generator Actually Does
A static site generator combines content and templates before deployment, producing HTML files that a web server can deliver directly.
- What a canonical URL tells search engines
A canonical URL tells search engines which version of a page you prefer when the same or very similar content has several URLs.
- How serverless functions work
Serverless functions run code in response to events while a provider handles servers, scaling, and much of the deployment infrastructure.
- Finding and fixing redirect chains
Find and shorten redirect chains so browsers and crawlers reach the final URL with fewer requests and less room for failure.
- What Makes Code Maintainable?
Maintainable code makes its purpose clear, limits dependencies, protects behaviour with tests, and stays easy to change.
- Git habits that keep a project understandable
Practical Git habits for clear commits, focused branches, useful reviews, and a history people can understand.
- Web accessibility starts with the basics
A practical introduction to accessible content, semantic HTML, keyboard use, contrast, media, and testing.
- Writing an article with ChatGPT
Use ChatGPT for outlines and rough drafts without handing over fact-checking, judgment, or your own voice.
- Use your Netlify domain as a Mastodon username alias
Make a Netlify-hosted domain resolve to an existing Mastodon account through WebFinger.
- CSS Grid or Flexbox? Choose by layout direction
A practical way to choose between CSS Grid and Flexbox based on the layout you are building.
- The non-technical skills that make developers better
Communication, judgment, collaboration, and other skills that make technical work more effective.
- Pull website data into Google Sheets with IMPORTXML
Pull public structured data into Google Sheets with IMPORTXML and a focused XPath query.
- Embedding audio with Hugo shortcodes
Create a small Hugo shortcode for reusable audio players with an optional caption and preload setting.
- Enable raw HTML in Hugo
Enable raw HTML in Hugo's Goldmark renderer, and understand the trade-off before switching it on.
- Why Linux is a strong choice for programming
Why Linux is a strong development environment—and the practical cases where another operating system may fit better.