Creating a smoother CSS zoom effect

7 March 2018
A zoom effect can be created with the transform and transition CSS properties. I have been using this on a project and was not entirely happy with the result. For the project I created a grid with articles that become larger if you move the mouse over the article. The article contains an image and…

Creating screenshots for WordPress themes

11 February 2018
Every WordPress theme should have a screenshot, even if it is a child theme. In the backend this will be shown to WordPress administrators in the list of available themes. A good screenshot makes the theme easily recognisable, especially if you have a couple of themes installed. And it is nice if you can visually…

Is detecting mobile devices with JavaScript all bad?

27 January 2018
A tweet about using JavaScript to detect a mobile device from Niels Leenheer (a.k.a. Mr. html5test) got me thinking. Because he says you should never use JavaScript to distinguish between mobile and desktop/laptop. A good reason to ignore this distinction is: What does “mobile” even mean? A cell phone? A tablet? A watch? Any device…

Limiting WordPress Gutenberg blocks

19 January 2018
The default editor in WordPress is somewhat crude. It is just a single (WYSYWIG) text area. All content is added here. Of course you can extend WordPress with custom fields or meta boxes to provide a more structured way of putting content in. You can code them by hand. Or use some plugin to do…

Lazy loading Google Maps with the IntersectionObserver API

12 January 2018
For business web sites it is quite common to have a map on the site. In most cases clients want to add a Google Map, because that is what a lot of people use. The problem is that such a map loads a lot of JavaScript and images. These maps are often placed at the…