Daniel Schulz

CSS View Transitions have landed in Chrome and are (for better or worse) widely available to most end users now. Safari is not far behind, with the feature being available in TP and Firefox is at least working on it.

I love how much simpler the implementation of multi-page transitions have become, but at the same time, I realized a big poet-peeve with them: Elements that are out-of-viewport start swooshing around wildly.

I recently put some work into my web synthesizer and even gave it its own domain at jssynth.xyz. I added some convenience features, but I also worked on a MIDI integration.

As with most of the more fringe APIs, the Web MIDI API is built as a mirror image of it’s non-web counterpart. It doesn’t support fully specced out events like onClick and its messages might be raw byte streams of hex numbers. There aren’t even unambiguous input events. Oh boy!

Anyways it is a way to connect a MIDI keyboard to a website and vice versa.

I really like the idea of a classless CSS stylesheet that can be applied to just about any website. There are already a few examples out there, as listed below. But none of them really ticked all the boxes for me. I wanted to have my own shot, so I made Ssstyles.

One morning I woke up to a mobile plan limit warning. (In case you’re wondering, unlimited plans aren’t a thing in Germany) That’s never happened to me before. I don’t stream a lot of videos, I don’t play games, I don’t really do anything that uses excessive data. But still, there it was.

(updated 06.05.2024)

The view Transition API is probably one of the most exciting new CSS mechaninsms. It's currently only available in Chrome Canary, but that's okay. It's designed from the ground up to be a progressive enhancement. It promises to provide a native way to build SPA-like page transitions. (Heck, forget about SPAs. Think of cinematic wipes. Video game menus! Remember fancy DVD menus?)

You know those kid’s bikes that you can upgrade from a balance bike to a something that will take your child to elementary school? CSS did something like that for me.

Chris Coyier updates his stance on his Great Divide theory:

"Since there is too much for any web developer to know, what is the most graceful and professionally acceptable way of not knowing things?"

I think the answer is honesty.

So, I rebuilt my website, again. Not because I grew bored of my design (at least not entirely), not because I wanted to update it for the Indieweb Revolution that’s certainly coming this year, for sure. It’s because my old Hugo setup was coming apart at the seams. I overcomplicated things and now i started to get the consequences of it. Time to rebuild a new over-engineered, complicated monstrum from scratch without realizing it!

I don’t usually do multipart posts, but this one grew a bit after I published the initial article. The setup I’ve got there describes how to import content from Notion to Eleventy and render a site. But it’s getting very slow very soon.

Static Site Generators are a great tool to generate a JAM Stack website from a data feed. That feed can be markdown files, or like in the case of Eleventy, an API endpoint that returns its data as an object. I thought It would be simple enough to attach Notion, as it makes an awesome CMS. The two seem like they could pair up really well, but getting them actually to play nice with each other takes some work.