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Do This to Improve Image Loading on Your Website

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In the video embedded below, Jen Simmons explains how to improve image loading by using width and height attributes. The issue is that there’s a lot of jank when an image is first loaded because an img will naturally have a height of 0 before the image asset has been successfully downloaded by the browser. Then it needs to repaint the page after that which pushes all the content around. I’ve definitely seen this problem a lot on big news websites.

Anyway, Jen is recommending that we should add height and width attributes to images like so:

<img src="dog.png" height="400" width="1000" alt="A cool dog" />

This is because Firefox & Chrome will now take those values into consideration and remove all the jank before the image has loaded, even when you override those values in CSS with a fluid width and thus unknown height. That means content will always stay in the same position, even if the image hasn’t loaded yet. In the past, I’ve worked on a bunch of projects where I’ve placed images lower down the page simply because I want to prevent this sort of jank. I reckon this fixes that problem quite nicely.

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monica.css

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Monica Dinculescu:

I don’t want every possible padding and margin and colour and flexbox configuration in the world. I just want the ones that I know I end up using in every project. So here is monica.css: my very own CSS framework, which I copy paste at the beginning of every CSS file and take it from there.

I love it when people make their own CSS starter. I like Sanitize, but even that feels like a bit much for most things I poke around at. If I was making one for myself, I'd probably steal some of this stuff from Monica. I'd definitely pull the margin off body as I find myself writing that line a lot. I'd probably steal some of that [class] stuff from Andy's. My center class would probably just be text-align and I'd give myself some other centering class for my other favorite centering: display: grid; place-items: center;.

I love how everyone agrees on box-sizing.

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CodePen for Education Questions, Answered

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I got a bunch of questions from a "Head of Customer Success" at a company that does developer education recently. They had some great questions about how CodePen could be used in their online courses1. The answers might benefit anyone in this situation, so here's exactly what I was asked and what I answered.

Which would be the best plan for the online course described?

Here's one way instructors/students can use CodePen for a course. The instructor has a curriculum for the course. Part of that includes coding exercises for the students. Those coding exercises can take the form of a pre-created Pen on CodePen. Maybe like this. The students then Fork that Pen and try to complete it, and they send the instructor their attempts.

Here's another way instructors can use CodePen. They teach live using the CodePen editor. Maybe it's projected onto the front of a classroom using Presentation Mode, or the students follow along on their own computers using Professor Mode. Those two features are PRO, so the instructor would need a PRO account.

Here's another. The instructor (or school) gets a Team Account. All the students are invited as members of the Team. That makes everyone involved have a PRO account, so they can do things like make Private Pens and share uploaded assets like images. As a new cohort comes in the students can be removed from the team and new students added.

Could it be billed monthly, quarterly or annually?

We offer monthly or annual billing on any of our plans (but not quarterly).

When is it billed? (at the beginning or at the end of the month?)

We bill the second you sign up, and then at intervals based on that day. For example, if you sign up on March 14th and choose a monthly plan, you'll be charged again April 14th. If you picked a yearly plan, you'll be charged again March 14th the following year.

Is the billing variable or fixed per term?

Plans are mostly fixed. If you go with a Team Account, Teams are charged based on the number of seats, so you can increase or decrease those seats at any time and are re-billed accordingly.

Is the billing per registered users, active users?

Only Team Accounts are billed on a per-user basis. Team Accounts are $12-per-person if billed annually or $19-per-person if billed monthly. If what worked better for you was only having the instructor with a PRO account, for example, that's a single user with a single fixed cost.

Our online courses are on-demand, so is it possible to switch on and off the course according to our needs per month?

Yes, you can cancel and re-activate on a monthly basis if you choose the monthly plan.

Our dedicated page for CodePen and Education is probably also worth a read.

1 - This kind of thing is sometimes a sign that the design of your site doesn't help answer these questions well enough. In this case, I'm not that worried about that. I think we do OK there, although this is good research for the next time we're tackling those areas.

The post CodePen for Education Questions, Answered appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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Solving Sticky Hover States with @media (hover: hover)

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Mezo Istvan does a good job of covering the problem and a solution to it in a blog post on Medium¹.

If you tap on something that has a :hover state but you don't leave the page then, on a mobile device, there is a chance that :hover state "sticks." You'll see this with stuff like jump-links used as tabs or buttons that trigger on-page functionality. 

button:hover {
  border: 3px solid green; /* might stick! */
}

The solution, or trick, is a new(ish) "CSS4" media query that allows you only to apply styles on devices with hover capability.

@media (hover: hover) {
  button:hover {
    border: 3px solid green; /* solves sticky problem */
  }
}

Your typical touch screen mobile device will fail that media query, the style won't apply, and you'll avoid the sticky problem.

Support is solid, so not much worry there.

  1. It almost feels like we have to apologize to linking to things on Medium lately. I have no idea what you're going to experience when you get there. Will you just be able to read it? Will it be a teaser where you have to log in to read more? Will it be behind a paywall? I have no idea. In this case, hopefully, this link post has enough info in it that isn't not blocking you from learning anything.


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Belvo API Brings Open Banking to Latin America

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Belvo, an open banking API provider for the Latin American market, is now live. After a successful beta program that began last fall, Belvo is fully up and running with a number of developer resources available. Its core offering, the Belvo API, aims to empower open banking in Latin America.

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Include With Where Clause

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Ever thought about writing the following query in Entity Framework?

SQL


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Editor Activity Indicator

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You might notice a smidge of extra visual activity happening down in the Pen Editor footer lately. We're trying to show you a bit more information about what the Pen Editor is actually doing.

Here's an example (5 second video) where I'm editing some HTML to include an <em> tag or not, and the editor is doing stuff to make that happen for me:

The idea is to show you (and us!) what is happening in the Pen Editor as we do it. Like sometimes code needs to get processed. Sometimes the preview needs to get rebuilt. Sometimes your code is off being linted or formatted. There is a bunch of stuff that might be going on in the editor, and we wanted a dedicated place to be clear about that rather than having it be a silent mystery.

The post Editor Activity Indicator appeared first on CodePen Blog.

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Creating a Details Element That Opens But Never Closes

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The <details> and <summary> elements in HTML are useful for making content toggles for bits of text. By default, you see the <summary> element with a toggle triangle (▶︎) next to it. Click that to expand the rest of the text inside the <details> element.

But let's say you want to be able to click it open and that's that. Interactivity over. I saw this used in one of those "Read more" article designs, where you click that "Read more" button and the article expands, but there is no going back.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not sure that this is a great idea in general. Removing controls just doesn't feel great, nor does slapping too much important content within a <details> element. But, hey, the web is a big place and you never know what you might need. The fact that this can be done in a few lines of HTML/CSS is compelling and might reduce the need for heavier solutions.

The main trick here is to hide the summary when details is open. 

details[open] summary {
  display: none;
}

That's it really.

The post Creating a Details Element That Opens But Never Closes appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Neurala Introduces Edge Learning through Brain Builder SDK

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Neurala, an AI-powered visual inspection solutions provider, recently announced that its Brain Builder SDK has now been optimized to enable edge learning for use cases such as manufacturing. Brain Builder is Neurala's vision AI platform. In its latest release, Brain Builder allows users to build, deploy and analyze customized AI solutions based on learning from a network edge device.

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CityU of Hong Kong Embraces API-Based Systems

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The City University of Hong Kong has set itself up for success by embraced an API-led approach to education, unifying the campus experience between City U’s five colleges and schools, a 4,000-member academic staff, and their 26,000-plus students. 

The API-led approach tackles the integration of legacy systems with a unified system. This API-based system will sustain an ongoing evolution and improvement within one space, rather than requiring the campus community to bounce in and out of different systems.

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How to turn your WordPress installation into a high selling machine

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Converting WordPress into a high selling machine is not a new thing. Rather, people are using various e-commerce plugins to convert WordPress into a selling machine. However, using plugins is not enough when you want to groom up your WordPress site as a top-flight salesperson. Here in this blog, we will discuss how several off-page […]

The post How to turn your WordPress installation into a high selling machine appeared first on WPArena.