Brian Suda packs his compass and map (well, his smartphone) to guide us all home for Christmas. And there’ll be one jolly fellow who’ll find this little web app useful on that annual 24-hour world trip.
Drew McLellan brings our 2015 calendar to a motivational close with some encouragement for the year ahead. Year’s end is a time for reflection and finding new purpose and enthusiasm for what we do. By tackling the thorniest design and development problems, we can make the greatest impact – and have the most fun. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Wren Lanier sets aside time to explore the benefits of a regular schedule for user research. Santa’s elves quickly discovered the benefits of working to a fixed schedule, which is of course why we don’t get presents at Easter.
Laura Kalbag beckons us in from the cold wastelands of transitional, device-rooted layouts to warm our toes at the hearth of a more systematic way of working.
Drew McLellan invites you to pull up to the 2012 24 ways bumper, baby, with an neat JavaScript solution to an HTML5 <video> branding problem. And that was “24 ways bumper” not “Christmas jumper”. He has enough of those already.
Stephen Fulljames places the reindeers of thought before the sleigh of action, encouraging coders everywhere to plan ahead when implementing JavaScript libraries.
Les James proposes an alternative to the fully fluid grid as an approach to responsive layout challenges. Sprinkle on some Sass fairy dust and, providing you’ve been good this year, watch your creation spring to life.
Bethany Heck slips warming cloves and spices into the web designer’s mulled wine by sharing some of the methods she uses to encourage and maintain creative success in new projects.
Amy Hupe prepares a four bird roast of tasty treats so we can learn how the needs of many different types of users can be served through careful implementation of components within a design system.
Emma Jane Westby exercises her poetic sensibility to help us understand how Git commands can help us out of sticky situations. Quite soon you’ll turn that clatter on the roof into the prancing and pawing of each reindeer hoof.
Matt Riggott demonstrates how to use Google App Engine as a CDN for serving your site’s images, CSS and JavaScript files from a location close to your users. Find out how using this free service from Google could be just the performance kick your site needs.
Josh Emerson extols the virtues of progressive enhancement by acknowledging the need for speed, in both website rendering and interaction. With a new year imminent, there never was a better time to look backwards and forwards.
Scott Kosman administers an optimizing shot in the arm to your seasonally sluggish jQuery with some simple ways to improve performance. Get your jQuery running so fast that Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen will struggle to keep up.
Ethan Marcotte explains the theory and practice of CSS gradients, separates the duelling syntaxes and wields a mean color-stop. No longer will gradients confound, baffle or frustrate. Just leave the rainbows to the unicorns.
Relly Annett-Baker extends this year’s daily December dose of web goodness to encompass the Twelve Days of Christmas, all leading towards an epiphany of delight in your content. Whip your content into shape for the New Year! And watch out for a strategically placed tea tray…
Jack Franklin darns the holes left in our applications by exploring how our client-side JavaScript frameworks might also be run on the server to provide universal support for all types of user. How will you react when you see mommy kissing Server Claus?
Julie Grundy kicks off this, our fifteenth year, by diving headlong into the snowy issue of customising form inputs. Nothing makes a more special gift at Christmas that something you’ve designed and customised yourself. But can it be done while staying accessible to every user?
Natalie Downe sets the presses rolling with an in-depth look at the state of print stylesheets in 2007. Often neglected by developers but much loved by the user, the simple print stylesheet can really add that finishing touch to even the best site designs. So get this down you. Ding dong!
Rachel Andrew unwraps the CSS3 grid layout module and sets out how its new properties can break the ties between source order and layout, and rescue us from the quaking ground of floats. Support is limited to IE10 right now, but Christmas and New Year are times for looking forward to the future.
Charlie Perrins reminds us of a fundamental requirement of our work: accessibility; and that there’s more to accessible interfaces than screen readers. Want to unplug at Christmas? Start with your mouse and don’t look back.
Nathan Peretic weighs the page refresh in the balance and finds it wanting – wanting to be brought up to date, that is, with some future CSS sparkle.
Scott Schiller sounds out the possibilities of HTML5 audio, listening carefully to arguments about competing formats and the quirks in current implementations. When will we hear the sleigh bells in the snow on your website?
Ben Ward walks us through the process of building a small client-side application using the Fire Eagle API. Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is a service for disseminating details of your location physical location to other services on the web. Ben shows us how such a thing can be made useful.
Drew McLellan releases the eager huskies of 2014’s 24 ways into the glittering snowy landscape of the web, asking you and other experienced professionals what should be the basis of building websites now. Ten Christmases is a long time, and not just on the web.