RWD Weekly #440

Hey everyone and welcome to week #440 of the responsive design newsletter and the last one for 2020.

A big thank you to you for you patronage throughout this difficult year. The newsletter has been a constant for me over the past eight and a half years and it was nice to continue to have that stability through what was otherwise a bit of a turmoil year.

I hope you’ve got your eyes firmly set on 2021, and I hope that throughout this year you’ve managed to pick up one or two new tidbits of knowledge through our weekly chats (albeit mostly one way chat :) )

Let’s get to those links!

Headline

This used to be our playground

A great post from Colly looking at the benefits of having a personal website. With people like Rob and Lynn leading the way for inspiration it’s something that I’m keen to do more of in 2021.

Sponsor

Solar System Subscription Box

Each month, for nine months, you will receive a single pocket notebook from the Solar System range starting with the Sun. The first notebook, the Sun, will be sent in time for Christmas and each planet will follow in the 8 months afterwards.

Article

Lazy loading uptake unusually fast

This is good news, I’m sure this is something linked with WordPress rolling it into the default handling of images but it’s still great to see the figures going up.

Ampvisory

Jeremy, who has been rather outspoken and against AMP in general, has now become part of the AMP advisory committee. Regardless of how much impact that committee has on AMP it’s good to see folks like Jeremy part of it.

Cloudflare Pages

Cloudflare Pages is a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites, plus you will also have access to Cloudflare workers as well. This is a serious competitor for Netlify, although I still think Netlify will continue to be the dominant JAM stack provider for a while.

The future of Google’s Core Web Vitals from a non-Googler perspective

A good overview from Peter here as someone looking over the fence into Google’s Garden. He questions if these are Web Vitals, or just Google Vitals given that they can only be tracked using Chromium. For me, the truth of it is that these vitals will impact on your ranking in Google’s search, and while that is the primary way people find information on the web we’re going to be bound by the advertising companies approach. Anything that improves a users experience is usually a good thing.

Tutorials

Sticky CSS Grid Items

If you’ve ever tried to put a sticky item in a grid layout and watched the item scroll away with the rest of the content, you might have come to the conclusion that position: sticky doesn’t work with CSS Grid. Fear not! It is possible to get these two layout concepts working together. All you likely need is one more line of CSS.

The Import On Interaction Pattern

Addy looks at how you can lazy load in components on the page only when users look to be interacting with them.

A home video studio.

Ben Frain takes us through the setup for his home video tutorial setup, along with some tips for recording and a link to all the products he uses.

Resources & Tools

Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Implementing best SEO practice can produce immediate results, but long-term performance requires long-term maintenance. Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, isn’t it? This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully there is enough to help you win over some of the most tedious search engine optimization issues.

Email resources

If you’d like to get into sending weekly/fortnightly/monthly newsletters just like this then this tweet has loads of great resources to help get you started.

WordPress APO with cloudflare

A simple one click on Cloudflare that will optimise your WordPress site to become as fast as it can be (at least from the click of a button). It’s free for paying members, if you’re on a free tier you’re looking at an additional $5 a month.

Jobs

Both of these jobs are working under my old boss, and for company that is producing some pretty amazing products for users to get into work themselves

Finally

That’s all for this week. If you’ve come across any interesting/helpful articles or you’ve written something yourself please hit reply and let me know about them.

See you all next year!

Have a great holiday period, and stay safe!

Cheers,

Justin.