Web development

Select works from my portfolio along with thoughts on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other front-end development topics.

And just like that, I was done with Netlify

As someone who uses Netlify’s Starter plan to host this site, the following situation is the kind of nonsense that keeps me up late at night…

Goodbye Gatsby, Hello Hugo

Hugo has ruined me. Other static site generators that rely on community plugins and copypasta to fill out their gaps don’t cut it anymore…

URLs and links in Jekyll

How Jekyll uses URLs and how to link posts, pages, assets, and other resources together.

Jekyll’s site.url and baseurl

Learn what Jekyll’s site url and baseurl variables are and how to properly set them with relative_url and absolute_url filters to avoid broken links and 404 errors.

Not so quick with the Gatsby site optimizations

This is the post where I talk about neglecting the site and pledge to blog more… wait, wasn’t I suppose to do this on January 1st?

2 Little Rosebuds

Creative and site development for 2 Little Rosebuds — a blog all about subscription boxes.

Twenty Nineteen

First time doing a year in review post. The statistics contained are just for fun as there’s nothing to compare them against yet.

Faster Netlify builds

Slowly but surely, I’ve been chipping away at my site’s build time on Netlify. There’s little left for me to optimize until Jekyll drops some nice updates in version 4.

Autumn refresh

Using CSS Grid Layout Module to redesign a Jekyll site and further improve performance and accessibility.

Optimizing and automating my Jekyll site build

Lessons learned from building, optimizing, and deploying a huge static site with everyone’s favorite SSG — Jekyll.

Styling language specific code blocks with Jekyll

Interesting styling possibilities with Kramdown syntax highlighted code blocks in Jekyll.

Relic Scout

Site design and creative for Relic Scout — an app to make collecting simpler, while saving you money.

Eko Wave

Site design and creative for Eko Wave — a team specializing in niche applications.

Jekyll themes

Open source Jekyll themes to get you started building a site or blog on GitHub Pages, Netlify, and other hosts.

Basically Basic

Your new Jekyll default theme.

Accessing static files in Jekyll

Learn how to use static files with Jekyll to create a gallery of images automatically without a plugin.

Improving Staticman comments on a Jekyll site

How to use Staticman to add threaded comments and reply notifications to a static-based Jekyll site.

HTML inside Kramdown table cells with Jekyll

The question of how to write a list inside of a table cell with Kramdown recently came up in a thread on Jekyll Talk — prompting me to look for a solution.

Configuring publishing sources for GitHub Pages

You know what sucks? Maintaining two separate branches of an open source project, just to host its source code and documentation together with GitHub Pages.

CSS blur effect

Playing with the new Depth Effect (aka fauxkeh) on my iPhone 7 Plus got me thinking about Gaussian blurs, and how to improve their use on this site.

Using SSI to detect cookies

In my never ending quest to micro-optimize the hell out of my site, I ran into a snag when trying to use SSI directives to improve the loading of critical CSS and cached stylesheets.