If you work on the web, your superpower is side projects. Unlike your regular job, a side project lets you take on an alternate identity, one of which you are in charge and no one can stop you. And the best part: If your impact is big enough, the whole world will soon know your name. Side projects are underused by the vast majority of designers and developers out there. In this article, Sacha Greif will give you a play-by-play account of the process of building and launching one such side project.
Read more…
This article contains 18 lovely world landmark icons such as the London Eye, the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. The icons are detailed enough to show architectural elegance but without adding chaos. They’re designed to work best in both digital and print media. As always, the icons are available for free download and use in all private and commercial projects. Again, as long as you don’t resell bundles of the illustrations, you can use the illustrations for anything you need.
Read more…
nginx released 1.9.5 this week and with that, lets you enable HTTP/2. Also, Firefox 41 is out and now brings support for SVG favicons. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
Read more…
In this article, Denys Mishunov aims to provide you with the reasons and theories for why things function in certain way. He will use examples that are observable in the offline world and, using principles of psychology, research and analysis in psychophysics and neuroscience, he will try to answer some “Why?” questions. Denys will also cover psychological aspects of some practical cases, like performance optimization of an existing project, how to deal with the better performance of a competitor’s website and how to make users barely notice any waiting for your services.
Read more…
WordPress provides a graphical user interface for every administrative task, and this has helped to make it the most popular content management system on the web. But in terms of productivity, working with the command line enables you to accomplish many such tasks more efficiently and quickly. In this tutorial, Konstantinos Kouratoras will describe the benefits of using and extending WP-CLI, and he will present several advanced commands to make your life easier when working with WordPress.
Read more…
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera dominate the world’s desktop browser market. Whichever statistics you check, you’ll notice that they often contradict each other in declaring which browser is leading the race. They may be the most popular, but they are not the only options available for accessing the Internet. So, what about the remaining share? In this article, Victor Clarke shows you 15 desktop browsers that are worth considering if you’re tired of the browser war champions. This list isn’t comprehensive — several hundred browsers are available online — but these are the ones that regularly receive updates and provide a new web surfing experience.
Read more…
In this article, Jordan Crone will talk about his experience with Cross-OS mobile app development. His goal was to cut through the typical pains in the app development process and create a three-platform app in four weeks.
His team was working with Scripps, an American cable TV media company; their new business development team had been working on concepts for new, rapidly developable apps. They wanted to prove that app development could be done leanly and agilely by working quickly, eliminating unnecessary clutter, utilizing cross-device user experience similarities and leveraging web views.
Read more…
Back in spring 2013, Smashing Magazine sported a <select> menu as its mobile navigation. It wasn’t considered an anti-pattern back then and Marco Hengstenberg still thinks it’s a viable solution to the complex problem of how to build accessible and functional cross-device navigation. Brad Frost wrote a few words about the pros and cons of this pattern on his blog and Marco couldn’t agree more. In this article, Marco will explain how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
Read more…
Hey, lovely to have you back here. Facebook announced that they built their first cross-platform React Native app. After nearly three years of development, Modernizr 3 is out now. Heydon Pickering explains how to re-create the goodness of gifs in a vector format with SVG. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list, so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
Read more…
For those of us who use Varnish and also want to move to HTTPS, there is a problem: Varnish doesn’t support HTTPS. If you make the move to SSL, configuring Apache to serve your website securely, then you lose the speed advantage of Varnish. There is a relatively straightforward way to deal with this issue, and that is to stick something in between incoming SSL requests and Varnish, a layer that handles the secure connection and SSL certificates and then passes the request back to Varnish. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how to move your website to HTTPS, taking advantage of Varnish Cache.
Read more…
