Smush Image Compression Wins 2018 Plugin Madness

For the second year in a row, WPMU Dev’s Smush Image Compression has won Plugin Madness! This year’s competition was fierce, but in the end, the image compression plugin came out on top. The plugin beat out Autoptimize, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization, previous winner Advanced Custom Fields, Custom Sliders, and finally Restrict …
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3 Revenue Streams for First-Time Freelance Developers

Beginning your journey as a freelance developer can feel like one small step for man, and one giant pain when trying to find work. You’ll want to find prosperous areas in which to apply your trade, but you’ll often encounter saturated markets that require hard work if you want to be successful. Finding a profitable …
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8 Typography Trends for 2018

Bigger, bolder typography is the go-to type trend of 2018. Designers are opting for less elaborate typefaces and pairing them with bold color, cutouts, gradients, and even customizations to create lettering that stands out. Each of these trendy type styles is moving away from the flatter, more conservative options that have been popular for a […]
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1 HTML Element + 5 CSS Properties = Magic!

Let’s say I told you we can get the results below with just one HTML element and five CSS properties for each. No SVG, no images (save for the background on the root that’s there just to make clear that our one HTML element has some transparent parts), no JavaScript. What would you think that involves?

The desired results.

Well, this article is going to explain just how to do this and then also show how to make things fun …

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Museum of Websites

The team at Kapwing has collected a lot of images from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and presented a history of how the homepage of popular websites like Google and the New York Times have changed over time. It’s super interesting.

I particularly love how Amazon has evolved from a super high information dense webpage that sort of looks like a blog to basically a giant carousel that takes over the whole screen.

Direct Link to ArticlePermalink

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BigCommerce: eCommerce Your Way (and Design Awards!)

Huge thanks to BigCommerce for sponsoring CSS-Tricks this week!

Here’s the basics: BigCommerce is a hosted eCommerce platform. In just a few minutes, anybody can build their own online store. From a personal perspective, I’d suggest to any of my friends and family to go this route. CMS-powered websites are complicated enough, let alone feature-packed eCommerce websites. Please go with a solution that does it all for you so your site will look and work great and you can focus …

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Some Recent Live Coding Favorites

There is no shortage of videos out there where you can watch people code with an educational vibe. A golden age, one might say. Here are a few that I’ve watched and really enjoyed lately:

  • @keyframers – “An animated, collaborative coding live stream by @davidkpiano & @shshaw.” They’ve got 2 epsidoes out now, each of which they start with an animated interface GIF and then collaboratively re-build it.
  • The Coding Train – Daniel Shiffman’s show is a force of

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Code Review Part 1: Fixing Design Flaw with the “Return Early” Strategy

While reading Josh Pollock’s first article in his Advanced OOP for WordPress series, I noticed opportunities to improve his code’s quality and performance.  So I reached out to him. As a fellow educator, he suggested that I do a code review and then publish my insights in a series of articles here on Torque as …
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New CSS Features Are Enhancing Everything You Know About Web Design

We just hit you with a slab of observations about CSS Grid in a new post by Manuel Matuzo. Grid has been blowing our minds since it was formally introduced and Jen Simmons is connecting it (among other new features) to what she sees as a larger phenomenon in the evolution of layouts in web design.

From Jeremy Keith’s notes on Jen’s talk, “Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed ” at An Event Apart Seattle 2018:

This …

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Another Collection of Interesting Facts About CSS Grid

Last year, I assembled A Collection of Interesting Facts about CSS Grid Layout after giving a workshop. This year, I worked on another workshop and I’ve learned some more exciting facts about the layout spec we all so love.

Of course, I’m not going to keep my knowledge to myself. I’m happy to share my findings once again with you, the CSS-Tricks community.

Understanding how the `grid` shortcut works

Sometimes, reading and understanding parts of the grid—or actually any …

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