Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith

Making websites. Writing books. Speaking at events. Living in Brighton. Working at Clearleft. Playing music. Taking photos. Answering email.

Journal 2462 sparkline Links 7343 sparkline Articles 68 sparkline Notes 3717 sparkline

Saturday, April 21st, 2018

Friday, April 20th, 2018

Timing

Apple Inc. is my accidental marketing department.

On April 29th, 2010, Steve Jobs published his infamous Thoughts on Flash. It thrust the thitherto geek phrase “HTML5” into the mainstream press:

HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Five days later, I announced the first title from A Book Apart: HTML5 For Web Designers. The timing was purely coincidental, but it definitely didn’t hurt that book’s circulation.

Fast forward eight years…

On March 29th, 2018, Apple released the latest version of iOS. Unmentioned in the press release, this update added service worker support to Mobile Safari.

Five days later, I announced the 26th title from A Book Apart: Going Offline.

For a while now, quite a few people have cited Apple’s lack of support as a reason why they weren’t investigating service workers. That excuse no longer holds water.

Once again, the timing is purely coincidental. But it can’t hurt.

Thursday, April 19th, 2018

That new-book smell

The first copies of Going Offline showed up today! This is my own personal stash, sent just a few days before the official shipping date of next Monday.

I am excite!

To say I was excited when I opened the box of books would be an understatement. I was positively squealing with joy!

Others in the Clearleft office shared in my excitement. Everyone did that inevitable thing, where you take a fresh-out-of-the-box book, open it up and press it against your nose. It’s like the bookworm equivalent of sniffing glue.

Actually, it basically is sniffing glue. I mean, that’s what’s in the book binding. But let’s pretend that we’re breathing in the intoxicating aroma of freshly-minted words.

If you’d like to bury your nose in a collection of my words glued together in a beautifully-designed package, you can pre-order the book now and await delivery of the paperback next week.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2018

The Untold Story of Jaime Levy, Punk-Rock Cyber-Publishing Pioneer

This excerpt from Claire L. Evans’s new book Broad Band sounds like Halt and Catch Fire, but for real.

Many people saw the web for the first time in Jaime’s loft, on a Mac II her hacker friend Phiber Optik set up with a 28.8K internet connection. As avant-garde guitarist Elliott Sharp performed live, and another friend, DJ Spooky, played house tracks, Jaime’s guests gathered around the Mac’s small screen. At the top of 1994, there were fewer than 1,000 websites in the world, mostly personal home pages. These converts would call themselves the “early true believers,” counting the year of their arrival online as a mark of status, the way the first punks claimed 1977.

Best Practices With CSS Grid Layout — Smashing Magazine

A great set of answers from Rachel to frequently asked questions about CSS grid. She addresses the evergreen question of when to use flexbox and when to use grid:

I tend to use Flexbox for components where I want the natural size of items to strongly control their layout, essentially pushing the other items around.

A sign that perhaps Flexbox isn’t the layout method I should choose is when I start adding percentage widths to flex items and setting flex-grow to 0. The reason to add percentage widths to flex items is often because I’m trying to line them up in two dimensions (lining things up in two dimensions is exactly what Grid is for).