I delivered a talk at the Google Developers Experts Summit in Berlin this week, covering some tips for writing technical content. I gathered a collection of resources to share, and whether you are interested in technical writing as a career, or just want to be able document your code, or communicate better, this list might … Technical writing resources
There is much to be unhappy about as we close out another year. The news seems relentlessly dark, with a cost of living crisis, looming recession, a collapsing health service, war in Ukraine, and a pandemic that is very much not over, while everyone pretends it is. I am a generally positive person, but that … 2022 in review
It’s Christmas Eve Eve, and I was adding the last of my expenses into Concur, when my work email account received a message. My colleagues, being more sensible than me, have vanished, so I checked just in case there was some actual content-related emergency. It was an email from Eric Meyer, informing me that An … Thank you An Event Apart
I keep seeing this pattern. You need a content site, and tools designed for blogging are a straightforward way to create a content site. So, you start a blog, except most posts are evergreen content. Content that you are going to update. Before long, you are updating old blog posts and finding they aren’t very … Stop treating all of your content as if it were news
At work, I’ve recently spent a good chunk of my time moving content off legacy sites to the current ones, including making my manager sad by finally pulling the plug on HTML5Rocks. I figured I might as well do the same during my weekends, so have moved my blog archive, so I can begin posting … A new home for this site
I didn’t write a year in review in 2020, deciding that it would have been too full of pandemic and fury. That was probably a good decision, and the fact that this post will have to touch on things that happened in 2020 only reflects the strangeness of time right now. At the beginning of … 2021 in review
Using display: contents should allow us to use semantic elements to ensure that our content is understandable by accessibility technology, while also not displaying boxes for those elements. It is especially useful when using grid layout and flexbox, as only direct children become grid or flex items. Essentially it allows us to promote grandchildren up … Good news about display: contents and Chrome
It will soon be two years since I wrote about the issues around CSS Grid and content re-ordering on this site. We aren’t any further forward with a solution to that problem. With new ways to jumble up your layout such as Grid Layout Masonry, plus new tools which allow the visual generation of layout, … Talk for axe-con: Grid, content re-ordering, and accessibility
I edit a lot of technical articles over at Smashing Magazine, and write a good few myself. Over the years I’ve absorbed a lot of information in terms of what works when writing tutorial content, and one thing I keep coming back to is that you need to know who the ideal reader of your … Writing technical articles: Defining your ideal reader
When I first began to demo CSS Grid to people, in particular the dense packing mode, at a first glance it looked a bit like the layout achieved by – most notably – the Masonry JavaScript plugin. Sometimes also described as a Pinterest Layout, after the application which is best known for using this kind … Does masonry belong in the CSS Grid specification?