Hi.

Just took delivery of this feast for the eyes and ears from Firecracker Recordings. Other Lands, Lord Of The Isles and friends on the sounds; House Of Traps and co. on the stellar artwork. Like the first release this was made in association with The Forestry Commission, is totally unique and I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

With the help of the CSS descriptor font-display: swap; we can use a little less javascript to get around web font loading issues.

Just watched You Were Never Really Here, directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix, with Clair. It’s hard-hitting and intense but really good. My favourite part was the opening 15 minutes which introduces Phoenix’s character Joe and uses Dark Streets from Johnny Greenwood’s excellent soundtrack to set the mood and tension perfectly.

The web != print, however I still find some of print’s time-honoured terminology useful for naming things. For example I use standfirst to identify intro paragraphs on Greenhill Journal Entries. This Guardian document provides a useful reference.

A free icon pack (with icons in SVG format) that may come in handy when I get around to levelling-up my SVG skills!

Linked resource: Styling a Select Like It's 2019

Here’s a breakthrough in the always-frustrating field of styling form elements. Scott Jehl of Filament Group introduces a new technique for styling the select element which doesn’t require a parent element, pseudo-elements, or javascript. Thanks, Scott!

A simple snippet for tracking page views on your website without having to add external libraries. This should save bandwidth and have a positive impact on the loading speed of a website. I’d be cautious about using this in production for now, but one to keep an eye on and try out at some point.

Linked resource: 18 for 2018, #1: Turner Street Sound – Nothin’ But Magic

My buddy Tom Churchill knows a thing or two about good records so his round up of 2018’s finest releases is well worth checking. He kicks off with a beauty from Australia by Turner Street Sound.

The Clear-Site-Data HTTP header clears browsing data (cookies, storage, cache) associated with the requesting website. It can even be used to deregister service workers.

As a side note, I wonder if it might be an idea for me to update my website boilerplate to contain pages such as /clear-cookies, /clear-storage, and /clear-all. Then, if someone is having some weird cacheing-related problem on a website I developed, I can simply provide them with a link to one of those pages rather than asking them to hard-refresh or launch incognito windows.

Linked resource: Blue Notes remixed: Classic Blue Note album sleeves built with CSS Grid

In August I saw a great presentation by Steve Honeyman on his self-set challenge to recreate Reid Miles’ iconic Blue Note label artwork in the browser. I was really inspired by the way Steve used what he knew (classic album covers) to learn what he didn’t know (new layout techniques).

Steve has recently been revisiting his original work to introduce CSS Grid. Amazing project!