Author: Nate Dillon

An Event Apart: “Graduating to Grid”

Rachel Andrew speaking at An Event Apart Seattle 2018 on April 2, 2018.

When CSS Grid Layout shipped into multiple browsers in the Spring of 2017 it heralded the dawn of a new way to do layout on the web. Now that the excitement of launch has passed, Rachel Andrew will take a look at what went right or wrong in these first few months, and offer help to those struggling to transition away from legacy methods. In a practical, example-packed hour, Rachel will help give you the confidence and practical skills to fully embrace Grid layout. We’ll compare common framework patterns to new Grid code, and learn how to create a workflow that is right up to date—a workflow grounded in new CSS, yet able to care for old browsers and ensure a good experience for their users.

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An Event Apart: “Scenario-Driven Design Systems”

Yesenia Perez-Cruz speaking at An Event Apart Seattle 2018 on April 2, 2018.

Unified design systems are essential to building, maintaining, and evolving our sites and products. By empowering disparate teams via a common visual and UX language, they help us create cohesive user experiences. But creating a unified system that scales to serve a variety of content and use cases can be challenging. Sharing insights from her experience creating a unified design system for eight media brands with eight distinct editorial strategies, Yesenia will show how to approach a design system via a user-centered lens. Learn how being scenario-driven helps you design a scalable system that responds flexibly to specific contexts.

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An Event Apart: “Digital Marketing Strategies for the Busy ‘Web Master’”

Sarah Parmenter speaking at An Event Apart Seattle 2018 on April 2, 2018.

Reaching through the screens of our customers and holding their attention is becoming increasingly difficult thanks to the pace at which online content now moves and our dwindling attention spans. Nowadays the job of the multi-faceted web designer is to not only know the latest techniques for building in Grid but also know how to get that work seen amongst the saturated world of digital marketing. In this talk Sarah will be discussing the idea of quarterly website design reviews with a “design once use everywhere” mantra, plus digging into the ever changing world of Instagram algorithms, Facebook marketing, and topical social media takeaways for immediate implementation.

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An Event Apart: “Beyond Engagement: the Content Performance Quotient”

Jeffrey Zeldman speaking at An Event Apart Seattle 2018 on April 2, 2018.

Our products are tasked with providing ever-higher levels of “engagement.” But should they be? For many sites, analytics demonstrating high levels of “engagement” may actually be signs of failure. AEA co-founder and longtime web designer Zeldman introduces a new measurement of design success: the content performance quotient. Learn how relentlessly cutting needless content and architecture, fine-tuning UX and UI, and shoring up technical performance can create improved experiences that are better attuned to today’s web… and how to sell this profound change in design thinking to your bosses, clients, and colleagues.

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Applying Drupal Patches in Composer

I recently had a Drupal core patch that I needed to use on a site I’m building. This can be done manually using the patch command, but when managing a Drupal project with Composer, any manual patches could get wiped out on the next run of the composer update or composer install commands. In order to make sure patches stick, they need to be added to Composer, like a requirement.

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Clearing Plex Caches

Although it’s happening a bit less recently, every once in a while when I add new media to Plex, the metadata does not appear. When this happens I first try doing the usual things like manually refreshing the metadata and emptying the library trash. If it’s still not working, I’ve found that manually deleting the cache files from the computer running the Plex server seems to almost always fix the problem.

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Using a Simple Python Server for Local Resources

I recently discovered that Chrome does not allow the loading of local resources when I tried to link a stylesheet from one local project to another. Here is an example of what I tried to add to the HTML in my project:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="file:///Users/name/Directory/style.css">

And Chrome gave me this error:

Not allowed to load local resource

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Using JavaScript Modules

A few weeks ago I spent some time breaking apart Sass files into smaller segments for a project at work, trying to go for a more modular approach for the CSS. Doing this in Sass is pretty simple. Pull out a section of styles into a new “partials” file, named something like _module.scss. Then in the main Sass file, import the module with @import "module";.

For quite a while I’ve wanted to be able to take a similar approach with JavaScript, breaking the main file into modules and using Sass-like imports to pull them all together. I knew this was supposed to be possible with ES6 modules, but every time I started doing the research, I was overwhelmed by new JavaScript techniques and tools (Babel? Webpack? Browserify? Rollup? RequireJS?). After my most recent attempt to find and understand a solution, I finally came up with something that works and I’m fairly happy with.

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