If your blog is on our modern platform, it got much faster this week. Major SEO benefits as well. Why? Core Web Vitals (CWV).
CWV is a new set of website performance measurements authored by Google. They measure the way a website actually behaves for a human user, rather than assess things that might look
We don’t have many sites on our network that run ads. On the whole, this fact contributes to the success of both our platform and our customers who use it. But in some cases, ads are an inescapable fact of internet life, and we have to deal with them properly.
One problem we have with
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a writer, WWII pilot, and general designer-of-things. Perhaps you’re familiar with his quote, “‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I think about this quote a lot in my work, and it informs our product decisions at
For the past couple of months, we have been working on making our platform compatible with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) format. If you’re not familiar with AMP, I think it’s fair to summarize it thusly: The practice of offering your website in a special format that Google invented, so that your Google SERP’s (search
No kidding, there I was, checking my email, when I saw it:
[RESPONSE REQUIRED] You’ve been selected as a speaker for WordCamp Maine!
It’s more or less my professional goal to infiltrate the inner circles of the WordPress community, so this came as good news. Even better, I already had my topic prepared because I’d written it
I’ve been writing WordPress themes and plugins for about a decade and recently I’ve been putting more effort into curating a personal “boilerplate” folder for new themes and plugins. In reading through it, I can see what concepts and components have become habitual for me, regardless of the subject matter of the project.
Some years ago when I first interviewed with LexBlog, the CTO reiterated several times that he really wanted me to be fluent in plugins, in addition to themes. I knew my way around plugins generally, but I liked the vibe I got from the interview and I wanted the job to work out well, so
Accessibility, also known as “a11y”, refers to how well a website functions for people with disabilities. Common examples of disabilities in this space include visual conditions like color-blindness, vestibular conditions like animation nausea, and motor disabilities such as cerebral palsy, which happens to be the focus of this article.
I am tasked with creating a “jump menu” for navigating tag archives. Something like this:
There is no submit button. By merely selecting a menu item, the page navigates to that particular tag archive. The premise of this UI is that, by not having to click a “submit” button, we save the user time and decision-making, hopefully improving the experience.
This all works well enough, assuming you’re using a mouse. But what happens if you’re using a keyboard?
Continue Reading How We do Accessibility: A Case Study
JavaScript wrangling has been among the most controversial topics in front-end development for a long time now. It’s right up there with tabs vs spaces and french press vs pour over. Here’s how we do at LexBlog in all current and foreseeable projects.
We kick off a plugin/theme JS file with a global that is namespaced for that project, containing handy functions used throughout. Example:Continue Reading How We Boilerplate our JavaScript
I was looking forward to writing about an intriguing bug in the new FireFox Quantum browser. I was looking forward to depicting the obscure CSS syntax that it bungles, and I was looking forward to explaining just what I plan to do about that. Given the rash of workplace abuses in the news lately, I’m