A lot of people these days are setting up their own newsletters. You’ve got the current big names like Substack and MailChimp, companies like Twitter are getting into it with Revue, and even Facebook is getting into the newsletter business. Some folks are trying to bring it closer to home with a self-managed WordPress solution via MailPoet. Let’s talk about another possibility: collecting your own email subscribers the good ol’ fashioned way: a <form> that subm..

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Say you have a z-index bug. Something is being covered up by something else. In my experience, a typical solution is to put position: relative on the thing so z-index works in the first place, and maybe rejigger the z-index value until the right thing is on top. The danger here is that this sets off a little z-index war. Raising a z-index value over here fixes one bug, and then causes another by covering up some other element somewhere else when you didn’t want to. Hopef..

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Let’s say we want to add something to a webpage after the initial load. JavaScript gives us a variety of tools. Perhaps you’ve used some of them, like append, appendChild, insertAdjacentHTML, or innerHTML. The difficult thing about appending and inserting things with JavaScript isn’t so much about the tools it offers, but which one to use, when to use them, and understanding how each one works. Let’s try to clear things up. Super quick context It might..

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Frontend Masters has been our learning partner for a couple of years now. I love it. If you need structured learning to up your web development skills, Frontend Masters is the place. It works so well because we don’t offer that kind of structured learning ourselves — I’d rather recommend a first-rate learning joint. CSS-Tricks is more of a place you subscribe to for our special blend of industry news, web development advice, and reference material. Frontend Masters ..

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Whatever Google wants it to be. I always thought it was exactly what your <title> element was. Perhaps in lieu of that, what the first <h1> on the page is. But recently I noticed some pages on this site that were showing a title on SERPs that was a string that appeared nowhere at all in the source of the page. When I first noticed it, I tweeted my basic findings… Where does that title come from?It's not the <h1> on the page, that reads:backdrop-..

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If you’ve recently started working with GraphQL, or reviewed its pros and cons, you’ve no doubt heard things like “GraphQL doesn’t support caching” or “GraphQL doesn’t care about caching.” And for most, that is a big deal. The official GraphQL documentation refers to caching techniques so, clearly, the folks behind it do care about caching and its performance benefits. The perception that GraphQL is at odds with caching is something I want to address in ..

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(This is a sponsored post.) There is a lot of buzz around apps running on the edge instead of on a centralized server in web development. Running your app on the edge allows your code to be closer to your users, which makes it faster. However, there is a spectrum of edge apps. Many apps only have some parts, usually static content, on the edge. But you can move even more to the edge, like computing and databases. This article describes how to do that. Intro to the edge..

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Container queries are going to solve this long-standing issue in web design where we want to make design choices based on the size of an element (the container) rather than the size of the entire page. So, if a container is 600px wide, perhaps it has a row-like design, but any narrower than that it has a column-like design, and we’ll have that kind of control. That’s much different than transitioning between layouts based on screen size. We can already size some things..

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When I came up in web development (2005-2010 were formative years for me), one of the first lessons I learned was to have a clean foundation of HTML. “What Beautiful HTML Code Looks Like” is actually one of the most popular posts on this very site. The image in that post made its way to popular pages on subreddits every once in a while. Now, while I still generally write HTML like that by default when working on sites like this one, I also work on projects that don’t..

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