You might have noticed that I’m starting to share links on here. There’s a hole that’s been left by publications like CSS-Tricks and A List Apart going quiet, along with the Great Fragmentation™ of so

Hi All! 🤗 Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we wan

One of my favourite things to do in my free time is to tinker with this website. Indeed, this website is the culmination of years of tinkering. I have added features like coffee shop maps that I can s

Robb Knight posts 2024-02-19 James wrote a great post with 100 83 ideas for things to do on a website [1] with a call for people suggest more so here's another ten suggestions to add to his list, most

Daily Tips One of the most common accessibility issues I find (and fix) on client projects is dynamically disabled form buttons when a form is being submitted. Today I want to talk about why developers do it, why it’s bad, and what you can do instead. Let’s dig in! Why developers disable buttons…

Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the fluffy…

Automatic Mastodon post embeds I use Nicolas Hoizey’s GitHub action to syndicate my web activity to Mastodon. Recently, I removed the display of webmentions from my posts after seeing Chris and Robb discuss some privacy concerns around them. Upon seeing David Darnes’ mastodon-post web component,…

Yes, this is a clickbait title, but it’s also (mostly) true. If you’re not familiar with Tailwind (bless your heart), it’s a “utility-first CSS framework.” I’ve written about my disdain for Tailwind b

I’ve always associated good design with thoughtfulness. Like, I should be able to point to any element in an interface and the designer should be able to tell me the reasons it’s there. Those reasons may be rooted in user needs or asthetics or some other consideration, but the point is that there’s…

Read later My latest post generated a few emails from people suggesting alternatives to my semi-manual Instapaper solution. The back-and-forth convinced me to describe how I use read later services. I

The mastodon-post Web Component allows you to turn a regular link to a Mastodon post into an embeddable post quote including metadata such as reply count, boost count, favourites and more. Origin Afte

Daily Tips I write a lot about my love of Static Site Generators. They’re fast. Easier to theme. Easier to maintain. Less prone to vulnerabilities. More portable. But they also require you to author your content in markdown. They don’t have a built-in CMS. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug. But if…

I recently replaced the logo on the top left corner with an animated SVG: Inspiration The first time I saw such stroke animations in SVG is the Material Line Icons by Vjacheslav Trushkin. It was cool, but I never thought about making one my own until I saw Mu-An Chiou’s banner on her website. I…

Links are what connect online content – they’re everywhere. Since they’re so common, their design and functionality often go unnoticed, especially when it comes to external links. But, as you’ll learn, it’s actually an important design decision. External links go to pages on different websites. For…

10 Comments In response to Crystal Scott. Crystal, that indeed sounds like a challenge. My only experience with Webflow and Big Commerce is that they are de facto accessibility barriers as platforms. However, I have no idea if the scenario you pose is genuinely intrusive, is configurable, is itself…

The Green Web Foundation has recently redesigned their green web hosting directory. Previously the directory was a useful resource for finding hosting platforms that at least claim some sustainable credentials but, as I’ve noted before the information provided by each web host was somewhat limited.…

Because I love Web Components so much, today, I thought we’d build an HTML Web Component from scratch. Let’s build a component that shows and hides text when a button is toggled. Let’s dig in! If you’

This blog uses static site generator Eleventy (or 11ty. I have no idea which one is the “official” spelling, and the docs appear to delight in switching gratuitously between the two! Let’s go with “El

I want to see more developers experiment with how they build their websites! Don’t just npm install a blackhole. Roll your own personal solution. It’s fun and rewarding! Where it Started My website is

Hi All! 🤗 In the last issue, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of persona

When to use CSS text-wrap: balance; vs text-wrap: pretty; At the start of the year I had written about how I wanted to spend this year writing about new CSS features landing in browsers. Life happened

I used to leave pull request descriptions empty. "Let the code speak for itself" or "let the commits speak for themselves" are the perfect getaway from the extra work of documenting your thought process. Recently, I've experienced that spending time on a good description is a worthwhile investment.…

GoMakeThings.com has been my home on the web for over 12 years. When I first started publishing here, I had an HR blog (I was an HR professional at the time), and wanted a place to just share cool, fu

Updated September 29, 2025, originally posted July 25, 2023; TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns. Test Details The first four examples are lifted from WHATWG HTML’s entry. The next three…

Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System . I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of

Homepage Contact RSS Feed Styles Tuesday 6 Feb 2024 Now that I’m in my 15th year of blogging it’s past time I spruced up my RSS feed . I’ve also launched a new bookmark blog . Perfect time to revisit

CSS! CSS! CSS! posted on 11.06.2023 I just came home after three beautiful days in Amsterdam, where I gave a talk at the CSS Day conference. I’ve watched many inspirational and engaging presentations

Jun 29, 2023 What’s The Perfect Design Process? About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬ Email Newsletter Weekly tips on front-end & UX.Trusted by 182,000+…

6 August 2023 There’s a new form design trend going around: Buttons inside inputs. Anthony Hobday mentioned it by asking his audience if there was any significant difference in usability between these 3 designs: 3 different layouts for an input and button combination Button inside the input Button…

Join the 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good (it’s an 11ty Conference) January 30, 2024 Originally: https://conf.11ty.dev/ In May 2024 (this year!) we’ll gather together our ext

Our industry loves Swiss Army Knives. The tools we tend to gravitate towards are ones that do all the things . They’re packed with features. I get the appeal, but I also think this tendency is harmful

the article element and screen readers posted on 04.07.2023 I wanted to know how and if common screen readers expose the element. Here are my results: Summary tl;dr: shit's complicated. Some screen readers don't announce articles and have no default quick nav shortcuts. Some don't announce them but…

the details element and in-page search posted on 30.06.2023 An important factor in terms of UX and accessibility for deciding whether the element is the right solution for a problem is the find-in-page behaviour. In Chromium-based browsers, the details element automatically opens when it contains a…

I turned off the Plausible analytics for this site. I used to use analytics mostly to look for links back to my site from other creators. When I had so little traffic, I could traipse through the data

It was nice to see Rach talk about stripping out analytics . I stripped out my analytics years ago and while I thought I wrote about it, I can’t find where I did so. My apologies if I’m repeating myse