Friday, March 29
Typekit Announces Bauhaus-Inspired Fonts
Web Tricks

Typekit Announces Bauhaus-Inspired Fonts

Bauhaus (meaning School of Building) is a legendary design school, based in Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Although it survived just 14 years—closed by political pressure as the Third Reich rose to power—and despite constant philosophical changes under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school has directly, or indirectly influenced every generation of designers since. From its central philosophy that form follows function, to the pioneering color theory of its influential teacher Johannes Itten, to its lasting legacy of students like Max Bill; it is impossible to overstate Bauhaus’ importance in the history of modern design. 99 years after Bauhaus first opened its doors, Adobe Typekit has launched a campaign to bring to life ...
Creating a Bar Graph with CSS Grid
CSS Tricks

Creating a Bar Graph with CSS Grid

If you’re looking for more manageable ways to create bar graphs, or in search of use cases to practice CSS Grid layout, I got you! Before we begin working on the graph, I want to talk about coding the bars, when Grid is a good approach for graphs, and we’ll also cover some code choices you might consider before getting started. Preface The bar is a pretty basic shape: you can control its dimensions with CSS width, height, number of grid or table cells, etc. depending on how you’ve coded it. As far as graphs go, the main thing we want to control is the height of the bars in the graph. Controlling height with Grid cells (like here) is convenient for designs where the height is incremental by a fixed value — no in-betweens. For example, signal bars in phones or when you don’t mind setting a ...
CSS Tricks

​​Build live comments with sentiment analysis using Nest.js

(This is a sponsored post.)Interestingly, one of the most important areas of a blog post is the comment section. This plays an important role in the success of a post or an article, as it allows proper interaction and participation from readers. This makes it inevitable for every platform with a direct comments system to handle it in realtime. In this post, we’ll build an application with a live comment feature. This will happen in realtime as we will tap into the infrastructure made available by Pusher Channels. We will also use the sentiment analysis to measure whether comments are positive or negative, and display this information on an admin panel. Direct Link to Article — PermalinkThe post ​​Build live comments with sentiment analysis using Nest.js appeared first on CSS-Tricks. ...
Web Tricks

Building A Pub/Sub Service In-House Using Node.js And Redis

Building A Pub/Sub Service In-House Using Node.js And RedisBuilding A Pub/Sub Service In-House Using Node.js And Redis Dhimil Gosalia 2018-06-12T15:30:58+02:00 2018-06-12T17:43:55+00:00 Today’s world operates in real time. Whether it’s trading stock or ordering food, consumers today expect immediate results. Likewise, we all expect to know things immediately — whether it’s in news or sports. Zero, in other words, is the new hero. This applies to software developers as well — arguably some of the most impatient people! Before diving into BrowserStack’s story, it would be remiss of me not to provide some background about Pub/Sub. For those of you who are familia...
How To Turn Your Users Into Advocates
Web Tricks

How To Turn Your Users Into Advocates

How To Turn Your Users Into AdvocatesHow To Turn Your Users Into Advocates Nick Babich 2018-06-12T12:15:44+02:00 2018-06-12T17:43:55+00:00 (This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) As businesses become more consumer-oriented, competition grows fiercer. Thousands of companies worldwide are struggling each day to gain more market share and to win over new consumers. A significant number of companies concentrate only on acquiring new customers — they allocate enormous marketing budgets trying to strengthen their customer base. But acquiring new customers only becomes harder and more expensive. According to the 2017 Digital Advertising Report by Adobe, ad costs ...
Web Tricks

Code Challenge #11: JavaScript Functional Programming

Previously on the code challenge #10, we delved into lazy loading images for performance, you can check out the challenge post and solution. This week on the code challenge, we'll be re-visiting the basics of JavaScript with Arrays. Arrays are like containers which hold various data types. While these containers are useful for holding various data types it is important to understand the manipulation of arrays to analyze and utilize withheld data. This is done with the use of specific functions which are actionable on Arrays called Methods. The Challenge This challenge is quite unique such that we will be using some really useful built-in array methods to manipulate the provided arrays. Three arrays are provided and each comes with 3 problem parts to be solved. In the first array: Part 1 -...
Web Tricks

Customize Payment Solutions with Enhanced API, Sample Code and SDKs

As developers build sites for merchants, we know that payment processing capabilities are important. But it’s not always easy to set up a payment solution that is not only reliable and secure, but also flexible and tailored to each merchant’s specific needs. That’s why Authorize.Net has enhanced its toolset for developers, offering a new, streamlined API, better sample code and SDKs, as well as a developer forum for support. The improvements make it easy for you to help your customers get paid — with security, flexibility and scalability. They also simplify PCI compliance and make meeting the requirements easier for merchants. Below, I’ll walk through the developer center, showing how you can use the improved tools to get your merchants’ payment solutions up and running — with just a few...
What Is a CDN and How Does It Work?
PHP

What Is a CDN and How Does It Work?

CDN - you keep seeing the acronym. Maybe in URLs, maybe on landing pages, but it never quite clicked - what are Content Delivery Networks, what do they do exactly? We'll explain in this overview article, and demonstrate on two popular ones in followup posts. CDN Basics A CDN is a network of computers that delivers content. More specifically, it's a bunch of servers geographically positioned between the origin server of some web content, and the user requesting it, all with the purpose of delivering the content faster by reducing latency. This is their primary purpose. These geographically closer servers, also called PoPs or Points of Presence, also cache the cacheable content which removes a lot of the load from the origin server. There are different types of CDNs offering different kinds...
Web Tricks

Join Scotch's New Community Portal on Spectrum.chat

We've created a new Scotch community on spectrum.chat. Come on over and join us. We're just getting started and think this will be a great place to chat. Join Scotch on Spectrum Where to Have a Community We've always found that Slack isn't the best place to have conversations around a specific topic. Things get buried too quickly in a chat room. We always wanted forums so we could have conversations about tech in general tech news support for articles/courses hang out with like-minded people If some of you remember, we actually built out forums but they were such a pain to maintain that I dropped them off the face of the Earth. Why Spectrum? Spectrum is great because it's a mashup of forums/chat/Reddit style threads. The other really great part is that you can subscribe to other groups a...
CSS Tricks

Versioning Interview

Adam Roberts (who you might recognize from our interview with him), interviewed me for the Versioning newsletter. I'm publishing my answers here for y'alls perusal as well! Which dev/tech idea or trend excites you the most at the moment, and why? I love that new JavaScript has arrived. I don’t know if "new JavaScript" is really the word for it, but that’s what it feels like. Major syntax improvements coupled with state and component-based thinking, coupled with powerful frameworks tying it all together: React, Angular, Vue, Ember, etc. Plus the ecosystem they live in, which often includes ES6+ processing, building/bundling, state management tools, and more. Particularly impressive are tools like Create React App that get you cooking on a whole fancy setup like that in seconds. Vue CLI is...
Digging Into React Context
CSS Tricks

Digging Into React Context

You may have wondered lately what all the buzz is about Context and what it might mean for you and your React sites. Before Context, when the management of state gets complicated beyond the functionality of setState, you likely had to make use of a third party library. Thanks to recent updates by the awesome React team, we now have Context which might help with some state management issues. What Does Context Solve? How do you move the state from a parent component to a child component that is nested in the component tree? You know that you can use Redux to manage state, but you shouldn’t have to jump to Redux in every situation. There's a way to do this without Redux or any other third party state management tool. You can use props! Say the feature you want to implement has a tree struct...
Once Upon A Time: Using Story Structure For Better Engagement
Web Tricks

Once Upon A Time: Using Story Structure For Better Engagement

Once Upon A Time: Using Story Structure For Better EngagementOnce Upon A Time: Using Story Structure For Better Engagement John Rhea 2018-06-11T14:00:52+02:00 2018-06-11T17:52:46+00:00 Stories form the connective tissue of our lives. They’re our experiences, our memories, and our entertainment. They have rhythms and structures that keep us engaged. In this article, we’ll look at how those same rhythms and structures can help us enrich and enhance the user experience. In his seminal work Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell identified a structure that rings true across a wide variety of stories. He called this “The Hero’s Journey,” but his book explainin...
20 Best New Portfolios, June 2018
Web Tricks

20 Best New Portfolios, June 2018

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism. Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy. Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly....
What are the Best Programming Languages if you DON’T have a Degree?
PHP

What are the Best Programming Languages if you DON’T have a Degree?

Without a degree, your best chances of getting work is with a small business. Over 80% of small businesses use PHP to power their websites. So that makes PHP the #1 choice for those with no degrees. WordPress is also widely used by small business, and WordPress is created with PHP, some JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. Together, these coding languages are part of what is called the ‘web stack’. Learn the web stack and you will open up MANY job opportunities. PHP is old and sucks – no? LOL! No! Old PHP from the 1990’s wasn’t very good, but much has changed since PHP4. Today PHP is at version 7 and it has all the ability and security as any of the other mainstream languages including: JavaScript Python Java C# Ruby … So don’t let uninformed nerds convince you that somehow PHP has problems. It do...
Popular Design News of the Week: June 4, 2018 – June 10, 2018
Web Tricks

Popular Design News of the Week: June 4, 2018 – June 10, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news. Can Minimalist Design Save Target?   Hatch – Stay Focused & Hatch Rare Creatures   3 Ways to Prioritize your Product Roadmap with a Matrix   Streamline Icons 3.0   Advertising G...