Back in 2008 I started my first blog. Its original incarnation was a WordPress site hosted on Bluehost. I’ll never forget the countless hours I spent wrestling with WordPress plug-in updates, sweating my database back-up process, fighting the content editor to produce valid markup and, on at least one occasion, losing several hours of work as a result of clicking the wrong button somewhere. WordPress was complicated and it sucked.

WordPress was complicated and it sucked.

Many are familiar with the idea of static site generators like Jekyll and why they should use them. But Jekyll isn’t the only SSG out there. In fact, there are literally hundreds of SSGs guaranteed to give you analysis paralysis. With so many to choose from it can be difficult to decide which to use.

After recently planning to do a survey of tools for building rich web apps I stumbled across  github.com/codylindley/frontend-tools, which claims to be an opinionated list of tools for building front-end applications. For those new to building modern web applications, it’s certainly easier to take in than larger lists like github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules. But lists aren’t necessarily the best place to start for putting an application together. At least not where the rubber hits the road.

In March of 2017 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web posted a short article on The Guardian covering three things we need to do to save the Web.

To paraphrase, they are:

• Increase individual control over sharing of personal data
• Improve diversity in Social media and Search channels
• Create more transparency behind political advertising

The third of which is, in my opinion, really just an extension of the second, so let’s briefly cover the first two and what you can do as individuals to address Tim’s concerns right now. When you’re finished, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how to protect your privacy online.

Following is a list of cross-browser/platform web development and debugging tools useful for client-side developers. Depending on the application, one or all of these tools can be valuable in completing work on a website front-end.

I wrote this late last year and it gets, well, a lot of traffic. Why? Because it hit home with a common concern in the JS community–a path forward for decorators. It just may change the way you build React apps for the better.

A couple years back Steve Souders gave a great talk at Fluent Conf titled Your Script Just Killed My Site ( video). During the talk Steve explained front-end SPOF and pointed towards a nice tool for detecting it. Fast-forward a couple of years and front-end SPOF is still a concern in web development. And, when building a single-page app, SPOF is an even bigger deal as it can cause an entire web app to become unresponsive, putting users at the mercy of the browser to download and execute 3rd-party scripts prior to bootstrapping. Read on to learn how to avoid front-end SPOF using Trunk Club’s single-page app skeleton, Brunch with Panache (BWP).

Learn how to avoid front-end SPOF using Trunk Club’s single-page app skeleton, Brunch with Panache

My team at work is currently porting an e-commerce SPA from an older framework over to Brunch with Panache (BWP), our open source development framework for web clients. Like the old framework, BWP uses both Backbone and CoffeeScript. But to make composing applications easier BWP kicks it up a notch and adds in Chaplin, giving us Collection Views.

One of the downsides with the out-of-the-box Collection Views provided with Chaplin is that they use JavaScript-based animation to fade-in the item views once the collection has been fetched. And while this may be OK for many applications, it’s not ideal for apps with pages which have many collection views, or for mobile user agents in general.

Spike at Airbnb just mentioned during a live TechTalk webcast that the Rendr framework they built was open sourced earlier this month:  github.com/airbnb/rendr. The framework leverages Node.js and Backbone.js to allow full-stack JavaScript MVC using a common set of code–greatly improving time to content, improving crawability, and reduces overall application complexity.

During the talk, Meteor and Derby were mentioned, and Mojito *sigh*. And Stitch was also mentioned, as a part of the stack they’re using. So anyway, there you have it. The Holy Grail I talked about. It’s out, but admittedly, according to Spike, not quite finished. Caveat emptor.

Here’s the presentation given at Google I/O this year by Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman that got me to switch to Chrome Developer Tools promptly after watching. If you’re a front-end web developer and haven’t seen this yet take a look. It just may change the way you work.

Recently ran across this impressive list of HTML5 cross-browser shim/polyfills on GitHub on the Modernizer Wiki. A perfect excuse to try out the Link format in the WordPress Twenty Eleven theme.