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JSNation Live 2020 Notes

Another month, another big and fully remote JavaScript conference. JSNation fit into my schedule a little less (and didn't quite overlap with my interests as neatly) but it was a fun event with some interesting talks on topics that are often only on my periphery. Much to think about!

Trunks and Masters

There are several strong arguments for moving away from using "master branch" as default terminology, but what should it be replace with? Personally, I like the idea of extending the tree abstraction that we use when talking about branches, so have started using "trunk".

The Pop-Up Paradox

Marketing needs versus user experience is a topic that I have some deep misgivings over, but a recent post made me want to try and boil some of those thoughts down into their underlying rationale. I'm not sure I totally succeeded, but there we go.

Jamstack Conf 2020

Notes from the 2020 Jamstack Conf. Some interesting dives in the Jamstack community and various applications of Jamstack technologies, with tweet threads as usual.

Lists with Hanging Indent and Custom Counters

Customising HTML lists often means sacrificing standard browser typesetting bonuses, like hanging indents. But with a little bit of modern CSS, you can get them back again, whilst still getting to use custom counters – like emoji 🚀

Useful Entry URIs with Headless Craft

When using Craft in a headless configuration, your entry URIs will default to the wrong domain and won't be properly configured to match your actual site structure, but that can be fixed.

Structuring Reviews

It turns out that there are a lot of gotchas to creating a clear category structure for media reviews. Well, after a year of messing around with various setups behind the scenes, I think I'm starting to get somewhere.

Thoughts on Disney+

Two months after Disney+ launched I'm still a huge fan of the content catalogue but swing between feeling bemused and exasperated at the actual experience of using the service.

Animated GIFs with Craft CMS on Krystal Hosting

Every time I upload a GIF to this website it ends up rendered as a single frame. It's taken me quite a while to get to the bottom of why that is.

Crafty Aliases & Environment Variables

Craft CMS has the ability to accept environment variables as well as aliases. It can be worthwhile understanding how these two seemingly similar concepts differ, and when you might want to use one over the other.

Adding Search: Refining The Frontend (Algolia, Gatsby, Craft CMS - Part 3)

The search page is live, the index is populated, but it all looked a bit rubbish and it didn't quite work as well as I wanted. Now it's using custom-styled components, queries are tracked/stored via the URL for persistence, and you can filter results based on category.

Gradient borders with rounded corners on input fields

Whilst putting together my new search page I ran into a problem: styling an input box so that it had a gradient border and rounded corners. Turns out there's a hack for that.