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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User reaction to a wait online is no different from that in the offline world. Studies based on the analysis of more than a thousand cases identify 14 distinct types of waiting situations on the web. Being dependent on your users’ loyalty, you cannot leave them facing a passive wait. In this final part, Denys Mishunov discusses pure passive waiting on the web, how you can deal with it and what can be done to keep user satisfaction high even when the service cannot be delivered fast enough. In addition to the studies on waiting online, your analysis will employ the psychology of waiting lines, customer satisfaction and other tools applicable to offline waiting.
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Today, join Cory Shaw while he reflects on some of the mistakes he and his team made, the tools they used, the workflows and guidelines they followed, and even some of the custom tools they built while working on the new Hawaiian Airlines website. All while growing a UI development team from one to over ten people to get the job done. It was a rollercoaster ride like no other, but they have prevailed and built what he believes to be one of the best airline-booking experiences on the web. This article and the information herein has been shared with the explicit permission and generosity of Hawaiian Airlines.
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One of the relatively recent tools introduced for styling is PostCSS, which aims to reinvent CSS with an ecosystem of custom plugins and tools. Working with the same principles of preprocessors such as Sass and LESS, it transforms extended syntaxes and features into modern, browser-friendly CSS. Over the next few years, the way you use CSS will change in many different ways. Every project will have different requirements, to which you will have to adapt your production methods. Working within a modular ecosystem like PostCSS allows you to pick and choose the features you want to complete a project.
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Have you used calc()? It’s a function that should work as a value in all places where a number value — with or without specified units — works. However, while basic support is really good, you might run into trouble depending on where you use it. In this article, Ana Tudor will look at a few examples of how to use calc() including what support problems they have (if any) and whether they’re ultimately the best solution.
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The “P” in P versus NP stands for polynomial time. That just means we can predict the maximum amount of time it will take to solve the problem. You may have never heard of P versus NP, but in this article, Zack Grossbart will walk you through it, show you how it works and explain why it matters. There’s a little math, but don’t worry; it’s all pretty easy. P versus NP is a mathematical question masquerading as a philosophical one. It describes the difference between solving a problem and knowing whether you’ve solved it.
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Today’s SEO industry is split into two related fields: content marketing and technical optimisation. The ability to create content that resonates with audiences and communicates a brand identity is vital to the success of any website, and articles exploring every intricacy of this art can be found on the web with relative ease. In this article, Tom Bennet will be exploring three of the fundamental principles of technical SEO. By the end, you’ll be armed with a wealth of techniques for organic search optimization that are applicable to almost all established websites. Let’s get started.
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In this introductory article, Slava Fomin II will show you the most important parts of the Sails framework and give you some specific examples to get you going. Of course, if you want to use it in your daily work, you will have to spend some time mastering it and taking it to the next level. The good news is that Sails comes with pretty solid documentation and an active community. The creator of Sales even answers questions on StackOverflow personally. He’ll neither confirm nor deny that Sails is being developed by a giant smart octopus, but he will do his best to guide you from the humble ensign to being the confident captain of your own ship! You will not be alone.
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A lot of game genres, such as racing and platform fighting games, rely on a gamepad rather than a keyboard and mouse for the best experience. This means these games can now be played on the web with the same gamepads that are used for consoles. A demo is available, and if you don’t have a gamepad, you can still enjoy the demo using a keyboard. As with all experimental technologies, results with the Gamepad API are unstable. However, by using it (and providing feedback), you are sculpting the future of the technology. This represents a huge opportunity for the game industry!
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In this article, Mathias Biilmann Christensen will look at four popular static website generators — Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, Hugo — in far more detail. This should give you a great starting point for finding the right one for your project. A lot of other ones are out there, but the ones Mathias chose for this article represent the different trends that dominate the landscape today. While static websites have been around since the beginning of the Internet, modern static website generation is just getting started. Use, share, improve, enjoy. Welcome to modern static website technology!
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