2016 in Review

— Jake Bresnehan

For those that have been keeping an eye on Web Design Weekly, you probably have noticed that things have been extremely quite… 😔

The first half of the year was quite productive. Lots of new articles, a range of site modification and great newsletter growth. It was shaping up to be a great year until August arrived. During the first half of the year my full-time job was pretty quiet so I had the motivation and energy to tinker and work on WDW in the evenings. That all changed pretty quick when we landed an awesome project at work and I was knee-deep in some pretty interesting development.

Adding Google Analytics to your React Application

— Jake Bresnehan

Adding any kind of tracking to any project always seems to be an afterthought. Generally just before launching, a stakeholder puts their hand up and states that we need to track everything…. Usually resulting in lots of frustrating mutterings from all developers involved.

Integration and Comparison for ES6

— Dennis Gaebel

If you’re still writing JavaScript using ES5 (also known as ECMAScript 5) and desire to author in ES6 (ES2015) fear not. We’ll look over some logical ways to start using this new syntactical sugar in your own work starting immediately. We’ll discuss and examine approaches to integrate features such as let and const plus compare var versus let and finally understand when to use the spread operator.

Integrate Stylelint Into Your Workflow For Better CSS

— Jake Bresnehan

Working within a team or solo can adjust the development priorities but one that should always be high on the agenda is producing the best code possible.

Working on a clean, well organised codebase is bliss. It’s enjoyable and productive. Working on an unorganised codebase is annoying to say the least. It’s often frustrating, painfully slow to change and test anything and invites laziness.

Thankfully as CSS developers we have a handy tool called Stylelint that can help us avoid the unorganised situation.

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Rationalizing Functional CSS

This post by Marcelo Somers looks at the good and bad parts of writing functional CSS.

I loved writing really clever, powerful CSS classes. I argued for it because of “ease of developer consumption.” My goal was that a developer could add a single class to an element and it would automagically do everything for them. Basically, the opposite of functional CSS.

3 months into a functional approach to CSS architecture, I’m addicted. The times I’ve used the old monolith approach, it’s become a tedious challenge in jumping between files constantly. I think I’m convinced, but I’m still trying to rationalize scalability issues as my functional codebases grow and evolve.

I’m a massive fan of functional CSS and would highly recommend experimenting.

jQuery 3.0 Final Released!

jQuery 3.0 is now released! This version has been in the works since October 2014. We set out to create a slimmer, faster version of jQuery (with backwards compatibility in mind). We’ve removed all of the old IE workarounds and taken advantage of some of the more modern web APIs where it made sense.

In a nutshell:

  • Faster
  • Deleted oldIE code
  • Slim version (removes ajax/effects)
  • Promises/A+ Deferred

What are you waiting for! Go and update your version of jQuery

Diffee

Instant visual diffing with CSS blend modes!

A handy little site built by Una Kravets that enables you to easily compare your development site against your production one. Oh and you can even test locally hosted addresses which is awesome.

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