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
There is a long-running discussion at LexBlog about the benefits and perils of third-party solutions. This discussion has been going on for so long that if you look closely enough, you can find evidence of it in this A List Apart post from 2014 by our own Scott Fennell. This post, is also the subject
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
I’ve been a big proponent of Zendesk after using their product(s) for several years at LexBlog. Like all businesses, LexBlog has gone through a variety of systems and processes cycles, and how we manage inbound requests is no exception. As I mentioned in my last post, a huge push over the last several years
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 often work with exactly one plugin active, other than the plugin I’m working on and its dependencies. That plugin is Query Monitor. QM adds a button to the admin bar that turns red when I make mistake, and reveals a treasure land of begun info when I click on it.
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