On Apache servers, a RedirectMap may be used to import bulk redirects. This provides an ideal solution for creating a self-hosted short URL service for any website, particularly static sites generated with Jekyll.

Create your own static site shortener with Jekyll and Apache

Frontend developers have long known that CSS nth-child selectors may be combined to yield interesting and practical results. Most commonly, this technique is applied to select all items in a list when there are more than N children, less than N children, exactly N children, or between N and M children. However these simple selectors may also be combined in other ways to produce even more advanced selectors.

Learn how to use complex CSS nth-child selectors

I care about URLs. I have spent time ensuring the URLs for this site are clean, concise, uniform, readable, and easily sharable. I subscribe to the idea that cool URIs don’t change and that URLs are UI. Even while I recognize that the “appification” of the web has minimized the importance of URLs, and I expect URLs to become increasingly niche as computer interfaces become conversational, the URL remains the defining feature of “the web” as we know it today, and I believe we should design URLs to embolden visitors with confidence.

Learn how to setup a great URL structure

In April 2017, Redditors made a compelling argument against blurred pillarboxing. The primary complaint of this approach is that it increases the file size, which poses a challenge for mobile devices where data is scarce and expensive, thereby increasing the load time. Additionally, pillarboxing makes the video smaller and difficult to see.

Discover a lightweight, responsive solution to vertical videos

Last week I received an email from a client outlining an issue they were encountering with Amazon’s Route 53 health checks which lead to a discovery about how Amazon’s string based health checks operate and how that can create issues with the performance monitoring tool New Relic.

Learn how to avoid issues configuring Route 53 health checks with New Relic