Practical Developer Tips for Digital Accessibility Advocacy đź”—
Hat tip to all the other digital accessibility focused folks out there, fighting the good fight to advocate, educate, and drive accessibility forward. [...]
Steven Woodson
Posts
Nuxt 2 to Astro 3 Replatforming – from Setup to Production 🔗
I keep hearing great things about Astro, and just so happened to have a personal project that I needed to move off of Nuxt 2 as its end of life date i [...]
Why Budgets are so Important for Software Development  Projects 🔗
As a freelance web dev consultant, I’ve been having a whole lot of introductory conversations. They generally fit in one of a few categories: potentia [...]
Web Components in Astro đź”—
I’ve recently been jumping into learning more about Astro, using a personal project that needs to be replatformed as an excuse to give it a try. The f [...]
Fighting Back Against Toxic Productivity đź”—
I received some great feedback from a recent social media post (on LinkedIn and Mastodon) about my sometimes unhealthy obsession with my todo list, I’ [...]
State of the Browser 2023 Conference Recap đź”—
Preamble I’ve been working on this recap in bits and pieces since the State of the Browser conference in September. Now that it’s already mid-October [...]
One of a Kind Business Cards đź”—
It’s been a while since I made some business cards, but I really wanted something to leave with folks I meet at conferences and meetups that would be [...]
Going Independent – Two Months In 🔗
I mentioned in the last post that I was considering only taking this through week 8. I’ve confirmed that desire, opting instead to focus on content th [...]
Eleventy Style Guide Generator – Step by Step guide adding to an existing site 🔗
I shared the Eleventy Style Guide Generator (source is on GitHub, here’s the demo site it generates, and an intro video from the September Eleventy me [...]
Pulling WordPress Post Categories & Tags Into Eleventy đź”—
TL;DR This is another part in a series of posts about WordPress content being pulled into Eleventy, including: Composable Architecture Powered by Word [...]
Eleventy Style Guide Generator with WebC Component Support đź”—
TL;DR I created an Eleventy style guide generator, features include: Automatically itemized JSON-formatted design tokens like colors, fonts, and fluid [...]
Going Independent – Week Four & Five Check in 🔗
Wow, five weeks already? I missed one so this is a roundup of the last two weeks. Here’s week 1, week 2, and week 3 if you’re interested. Let’s dive i [...]
Going Independent – Week Three Check in 🔗
Keeping the weekly check in train rolling! Here’s week 1 and week 2 in case you’re looking to catch up. What Happened Last Week I got a response back [...]
I Want To Be Known For… – Freelance Introspection 🔗
This is a follow up post from The Ideal Client and Project – Freelance Introspection, continuing my introspective journey as I iterate on my various o [...]
Going Independent – Week Two Check in 🔗
I’m following the same format I did in last weeks check in, it’s the simplest way to jot things down quickly and seemed to be well received as “easily [...]
The Ideal Client and Project – Freelance Introspection 🔗
I’ve realized there’s a surprising amount of introspection required when you decide to go freelance. One is to figure out “the ideal” client and proje [...]
Going Independent – Week One Check in 🔗
It’s been a week since I shared I’m focusing on full time freelance web dev, which was about a week after being let go from my previous full time posi [...]
Steve Woodson – Independent Web Development Consultant 🔗
TL;DR I’m terrible at burying the lede (as it’s the title of this post) so I’m starting with the TL;DR. I’m venturing out on my own offering freelance [...]
I Was Laid Off, Now What? đź”—
If you’ve been following the news lately, it’s been a rather tough time in technology this year. Not a week goes by without news of several major comp [...]
Intentional Attention – My Organization Strategy for Interesting Reads 🔗
I’m trying to be more intentional about reading through the backlog of cool projects, articles, and newsletters I collect throughout the day. Be it fr [...]
Plaid Swatch Generator đź”—
Sometimes you’ve gotta make time to build something fun, today I whipped up a Plaid Swatch Generator! Background I built up my personal branding cente [...]
How I Hacked My Brain to Let Myself Relax in the Evenings đź”—
Do you ever find yourself constantly on the go, always trying to be productive? I’ve struggled with this for most of my adult life, spending evenings [...]
Email Newsletters – My Emotional Response Spectrum and Organization Strategy 🔗
How’s that for a title? Basically, this is all about how I personally categorize newsletters, how that categorization has influenced how they’re organ [...]
CloudFront Function for basic auth, redirect, and serving from S3 đź”—
I recently had the opportunity to rethink how some CDN customizations were happening within an Amazon AWS managed project. Previously, we had used a c [...]
Conserving Sentry Transactions by Ignoring Laravel Routes đź”—
Yet another case of trying to find an answer to a very particular problem, coming up empty, solving it myself, and posting about it for future generat [...]
Joining the IndieWeb with Webmentions and Microformats đź”—
I’ve finally spent some time setting up Webmentions and adding some Microformats formatting to this site! These technologies have been around for quit [...]
Adding a Table of Contents to dynamic content in 11ty đź”—
This is a follow up post to Pulling WordPress Content into Eleventy, I’ve also written about how to make use of WordPress post categories and tags too [...]
Solving Animation Layout Flickering Caused by CSS Transitions đź”—
I recently had the opportunity to redo the header section of an inherited codebase. Everything was going great, my version was nearly 30% less code, m [...]
A Step-by-Step Guide to Sorting Eleventy Global Data Files by Date đź”—
In Eleventy, there’s a lot of helpful built in methods to manage content sorting by date. But if you wanted to manage your static (or API-driven?) dat [...]
Getting Started in Technical Leadership đź”—
I’ve been given the immense privilege of leading projects and teams of various sizes over the years, and an equally immense amount of grace as I inevi [...]
Thought Experiment – Greatest Superpower and Biggest Weakness 🔗
It could be the nostalgic reflection that seems to come on at the end of the calendar year but I’m giving this some thought to see if it affects my go [...]
Pulling WordPress Content into Eleventy đź”—
This is a follow up on my previous post Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress, focused specifically on how to pull content from WordPress via t [...]
SSH “Server Key Changed” Error and How to Fix It 🔗
I’ve come across the following SSH server key error a handful of times while working within my local environments and every time I’ve had to look up w [...]
Making Intervention Image Ignore SVGs đź”—
I recently started seeing a recurring exception pop up on one of my sites related to resizing and caching of images, after a bit of digging I realized [...]
Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress đź”—
It’s inevitable that – as a developer – I continue to change my mind and feel the urge to tinker again and again. Like a pendulum swinging back and fo [...]
IAAP CPACC Exam Preparation and Reflection đź”—
Happy to say I recently checked off a pretty large goal off my list by achieving my CPACC certification! I sat for the exam in early February 2022 and [...]
Implementing Dark Mode đź”—
I love getting feedback from folks using the Be Inclusive app, my favorite feedback by far is actionable suggestions to make the app better. One such [...]
Alternatives for object-fit in IE11 đź”—
The problem I recently came across an interesting issue where several prerequisites led to my turning to the object-fit CSS property to achieve the de [...]
Soft Skills: Productivity and Goal Setting đź”—
I wrote an earlier post called “Improving Your Emotional Intelligence,” which introduced the topic of soft skills and practical advice on how to incor [...]
Empathy in Web Accessibility đź”—
Today we celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day with an exploration into how building empathy is fundamental to improving our approach to web ac [...]
What the Font are Vertical Rhythm and Modular Scale? đź”—
Anyone that’s been in earshot of me has likely heard my ramblings about style guides, and a big part of that lately has been establishing a vertical r [...]
Soft Skills: Improving Your Emotional Intelligence đź”—
Who doesn’t want to make a difference in other people’s lives while also maintaining productivity? Proven soft skill techniques can make this seemingl [...]
The Four Levels of Mobile Browser Testing đź”—
If there’s one item that doesn’t change from project to project, it’s timelines and budgets. So how do we manage the growing complexity of development [...]
Managing Multi-Tenant Component Styles đź”—
In this article, we’re going to trace the path we took to accomplish a unique, cohesive design system for multiple sites within a single Content Manag [...]
Off-canvas Menu + Fixed Navbar = Buggy iOS Safari đź”—
While working on a responsive refresh of the Upshot website I came across some buggy behavior when mixing an off-canvas menu with a fixed position ele [...]
Avoiding Career Stagnation đź”—
As a web developer the potential for career stagnation – feeling stuck, idle, and lacking progression – is higher than average. With technology consta [...]
Filtering and Sorting a Table with PHP đź”—
I had a friend ask me earlier this week if I knew of any resources that could point him in the right direction on how to create a PHP page of tabular [...]
PHP Functions – Part 2 🔗
Pad, Reduce, Chunk I lumped these three functions together because I doubt I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve used any of them. Though [...]
Recharge & Release đź”—
I find that I go through productivity phases, generally the two I am most cognizant of are what I can loosely refer to as recharge and release. When r [...]
No Shame In Looking It Up đź”—
Web developers are tasked with remembering several different programming languages in order to effectively get the job done. HTML, CSS, & Javascript a [...]
PHP Functions – Part 1 🔗
I’ve been working with PHP for several years, dare I say a decade at this point, and I’m still surprised at functions I’ve never or rarely used. In an [...]
Apache 2GB file limit đź”—
Just came across a new issue I hadn’t dealt with before, apparently once a file (in my case a very large error_log file) reaches 2GB or 2,147,483,647 [...]
URI vs URL? Think Scotch vs Whisky đź”—
For the longest time, I’ve been unconsciously transposing URI and URL (with the occasional sprinkling of “web address”) in conversations and correspon [...]
Website Performance – gZipping & Extended Expirations 🔗
With a mixture of a few techniques added to the .htaccess or httpd.conf files, you can reduce the pageload and the bandwith usage of your website fair [...]
MySQL Optimization Top Ten List đź”—
I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of [...]