Blog

I posted recently about an updated blog design, the first in 8 years. And now I’m doing another post about another redesign. My original intention was to build a front end in React+Remix and use WordPress headlessly as the backend. I ran into a few issues with this approach and it was going to be […]

I wanted to do a little update on my spray paint stencil experiments using HTML and JavaScript. While it’s not a recent thing, I realised that I had never done a update with the last painting app I built. It was a couple years ago that I built Graffiti Monster, an experimental drawing app which […]

I was reading an article recently that had some really nice graphic design examples. One piece that stood out was a poster that had a continuous gradient that filled the gaps between words in a block a text. I wondered if it could be achieved dynamically in CSS. Below is my result. Note that this […]

The other day I came across a design on Layers that used a blur fade over an image as a backdrop for text in a card. It reminded me of a similar thing I attempted a couple years ago in CSS but wasn’t able to get working. I decided to have another go at it […]

There are two data types that I quite often run into issues with down the track when fixing bugs of implementing new features – Arrays and booleans. Booleans What’s wrong with booleans? Nothing per-se, but they can become a problem when used to keep track of states. For example isLoading. It seems simple enough in […]

If you a reading this on purplesquirrels.com.au then you might not see any difference. If you are on benfoster.com.au then you will be seeing the new site. It’s hard to believe that the last redesign of my blog was all the way back in 2014. I made a few tweaks back in 2019, but for […]

If you have ever tried to use an SVG path for a CSS clip-path you would have likely ran into the issue where the SVG path doesn’t correctly scale and fill the DOM element to clip it. Turns out it’s pretty simple to solve and has to do with absolute vs relative paths in the […]

I recently discovered a strange issue where inserting colour stops in gradients with my colour picker was not inserting the correct color. It was slightly off, a bit darker than what was expected. I knew Chrome has recently released support for new colour spaces, could this be causing the problem? Turns out, yes. The same […]

The longer you work in the web field the more you notice the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other. Is this just the latest swing of the pendulum from the SPA to SSR extremes?

Today I needed to update a couple Lambda functions from the Node 8 runtime to use the Node 10.x runtime. These functions required headless Chrome because they are used to take screenshots. Unfortunately, moving from the Node 8 runtime to 10x runtime is not a simple as it sounds, because AWS have decided to change […]