Until recently, I've been using GitHub Actions to trigger builds on my website, but this approach meant that builds for the site were only run once a day and that I couldn't schedule specific times for posts to go live. In February of this year, Netlify announced Scheduled Functions
, and one of the use cases that I'd seen mentioned was scheduling builds.
When version 1.0.0 of Eleventy was released, one of the features that I was excited to see was the ability to add global data through configuration. This means that plugins can now add global data, and I saw it as a great opportunity to move my webmentions code into a plugin for others to use!
I remember the day in 2011 when the design agency that I worked for decided that we were dropping IE6 support and raising our minimum to IE 9. Among other things, we didn't have to use images for rounded corners any more, we could use border-radius!
Adding rounded corners to items such as images and buttons makes them feel a bit softer and more aesthetically pleasing, but I didn't feel that regular rounded corners would suit the style of my website. That's when I had the idea to use CSS clip-path
.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a "robot scientist". I found them fascinating and wanted to learn about how they work and how to build them, but I lived in the middle of nowhere, in a time when the web was still finding it's feet, which meant that the resources weren't really there for me and eventually I realised that it wasn't really a viable option.
In my early teens, I found web development and I've been hooked ever since. Open source was, and still is, massively helpful for me to learn from. Whether that's taking apart open source projects to learn how they work, or contributing to them.
Recently, I found out that these two worlds collided.
While I was rebuilding my website in Eleventy, I saw Amber Wilson's article about adding Webmentions to her site
shared on Twitter. I'd heard of Webmentions but I'd never really looked into them and while I was reading Amber's post, I thought that it's a really cool idea and added them to the list of things I wanted to add to my site.
So today I had my first COVID vaccination. Following the examples set by Bruce Lawson
and Stuart Langridge
, I felt I'd write about my experience getting the vaccine.
Ever since I gave Eleventy
a go when I was building the LeedsJS
website, I've been a huge fan and advocate, even convincing some people to give it a try out of my sheer enthusiasm for it. I absolutely love the simplicity and flexibility of it, as well as things like data files. I have a whole post talking about this stuff from when I was building the new LeedsJS website.
I've been meaning to convert my own site over for a while, and recently took the plunge and decided to do it. As well as giving me the opportunity to dig into Eleventy without a deadline pressing me, it also gave me the chance to make some stylistic changes.
A couple of weeks ago an idea popped into my head, I built it in a few hours and today, as it's a bank holiday, I'm launching it into the world!
Today is CSS naked day 2020
! Inspired by Eric Meyer
, Laura Kalbag
and Andy Bell
, I've removed the CSS from my site for today.
The process for me was super easy! Because my HTML was already well structured and I had decent default sizes for my images, I just had to remove the links to the CSS files and it worked!
Many companies have internal APIs that provide their data, but scaling these can be tricky and expensive. There are also cases where you're using a rate-limited 3rd party API that you need to use to provide data to the frontend of your website.
While I was working at Sky Betting and Gaming, I was introduced to a pattern that they use called a viewbuilder. I find it to be a really interesting and useful idea, and we used it heavily in my time there.