The WordPress server stack has had to evolve over the years to keep up with this need for speed, therefore WordPress server stack looks quite different today than it did a few years ago. To better understand it, Carl Alexander is going to explore this new stack in detail. You’ll see how the various pieces fit together to make a WordPress website fast.Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more!
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From coworking spaces geared to nurturing the next generation of tech unicorns to boutique offerings, coffee shops, amazing workshops, art galleries and even a beach locale, Gemma Church has scoured a hundred coworking spaces across the world. Coworking spaces allow freelancers, small business owners and independent workers to rent a working area that is shared with others. The setup is usually more casual than the fixed rental agreement you would get in a dedicated office space.
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Benefits such as personal growth, creative exploration and generation of professional opportunities are some of the reasons to engage in personal side projects. In this article, Jon Yablonski will explore these benefits, as well as learn how to decide on a project and how to effectively manage your time. Finally, for inspiration, Jon will look at some great examples of personal projects. We hope you will be inspired to start your own side project!
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Stylelint is a powerful style sheet linter. It brings clarity to code and saves you from errors. It’s useful for everyone. Once you start using it, you will hear no more comments like, “You forgot to remove it there.” in this article, Aleks Hudochenkov will show you why linting a style sheet matters, how stylelint brings order to a style sheet and how we can avoid errors. Happy developing, and may you have a peaceful code review.
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Melody Jams may not have made the creators millionaires, but it’s with no doubt an incredibly successful project. Since Melody Jams’ launch Jamie Kosoy and his team overcame massive technical, mental and physical challenges to produce something that is of really high quality. A certain kind of ruthlessness was required with the number of features they wanted to create. They had to go well out of their way to prove their trust to one another. And they had to constantly be making stuff to show each other, rather than just talking about what they were going to make.
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Dependencies are everywhere. They’re unavoidable. They aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t consider the possibility a given dependency might not be met, you run the risk of frustrating your users. Reducing dependencies improves the likelihood that your site will be usable by the greatest number of people in the widest variety of scenarios. Even knowing this, however, it’s easy to overlook the most basic dependencies our projects have, undermining their resilience in the process. To illustrate this point, consider the humble submit button.
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In this final part of this series, Jon Hensley will focus on the principles of continuation and common fate, which involve movement, both implied and animated, to create relationships. Using these principles, along with the principles of similarity, proximity, closure and figure-ground, will strengthen your own design skills and help you create a better experience for your users. Oh, and one final thing. After applying these principles, make sure to test out your designs with users to see what works best for them.
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If you write CSS for a living, it is important to understand how to write valid CSS property values correctly. Once you understand how different values can be combined or multiplied, the CSS property value syntax becomes much easier to comprehend. The following syntax can be hard to understand if you don’t know the various symbols and how they work. However, it is worth taking the time to learn. If you understand how the W3C defines property values, you will be able to understand any of the W3C’s CSS specifications.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Image filters are a fun and effective way to provide visual unity and aesthetic appeal on the web. Keep in mind that they do come with a slight performance hit, but also with the benefits of speedy design in the browser and the opportunity to design interactions with. In this article, Una Kravets will take a look at one of the most popular image effects, grayscale, and assess both the ease of implementation and performance implications of HTML canvas, SVG, CSS filters, and CSS blend modes. Which one will win?
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