Options for Hosting Your Own Non-JavaScript-Based Analytics
October 18th, 2019
There are loads of analytics platforms to help you track visitors and usage data on your sites. Perhaps most notably Google Analytics, which is widely used (including on this site), probably due to it’s ease of integration, feature-richness, and the fact that it’s free (until you need to jump up to the enterprise tier which…
The Angular Team @ AngularConnect 2019
October 17th, 2019
It was our pleasure to attend AngularConnect again this year and to talk to hundreds of amazing engineers. This year the team focused on sharing insights and opening the curtain into some of the internals of how Angular works and the challenges we are taking on as a team. Day 1 Keynote https://medium.com/media/9d572bdf17361262c050a37f883c52c4/href Igor Minar and I…
Ten-Ton Widgets
October 15th, 2019
At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order to add a “email us” button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat…
Let’s Make a Fancy, but Uncomplicated Page Loader
October 15th, 2019
It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve “perceived” performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is. There’s no shortage of ways to make…
Hack for Good
October 14th, 2019
The Angular and NativeScript teams teamed up last month to organise the first ng-ns Hack For Good — an online hackathon with prizes, where all participants were asked to build mobile apps with NativeScript Angular for NGOs and good causes. The rules were quite simple: starting from Thursday the 12th of September, participants — working alone or in teams of…
Recipes for Performance Testing Single Page Applications in WebPageTest
October 10th, 2019
WebPageTest is an online tool and an Open Source project to help developers audit the performance of their websites. As a Web Performance Evangelist at Theodo, I use it every single day. I am constantly amazed at what it offers to the web development community at large and the web performance folks particularly — for…
A Snippet to See all SVGs in a Sprite
October 8th, 2019
I think of an SVG sprite as this: <svg display=”none”> <symbol id=”icon-one”> … <symbol> <symbol id=”icon-two”> … <symbol> <symbol id=”icon-three”> … <symbol> </svg> I was long a fan of that approach for icon systems (<use>-ing them as needed), but I favor including the SVGs directly as needed these days. Still, sprites are fine, and fairly…
Using GitHub Template Repos to Jump-Start Static Site Projects
October 4th, 2019
If you’re getting started with static site generators, did you know you can use GitHub template repositories to quickly start new projects and reduce your setup time? Most static site generators make installation easy, but each project still requires configuration after installation. When you build a lot of similar projects, you may duplicate effort during…
Automated (and Guided!) Accessibility Audits with axe Pro
October 3rd, 2019
It’s important to know there are tools for automated accessibility testing of websites. They are a vital part of helping make sure your website is usable for everyone, which is both a noble goal and damn good for business. Automated tests won’t catch every potential accessibility issue, but they help a great deal, and in…
Demonstrating Reusable React Components in a Form
October 2nd, 2019
Components are the building blocks of React applications. It’s almost impossible to build a React application and not make use of components. It’s widespread to the point that some third-party packages provide you with components you can use to integrate functionality into your application. These third-party components tend to be reusable. The difference between them…