Episode 19
Originally published via email on January 5th, 2018.
So, this is 2018. I hope you are going to have a great and successful year and am looking forward to featuring your Kirby projects, themes or plugins in one of the following Kosmos episodes.
I'm sure it's going to be a great year as far as Kirby is concerned, not only because we are expecting the release of Kirby 3 later this year, but also because of our awesome community, more Kirby Workshops, and certainly plenty of other nice surprises.
The Kirby year will start off with a new Kirby version with several fixes, Kirby 2.5.9. The release candidate will be released next week. As always, we hope you will have a chance to test it with your existing projects before the final release a week after.
Kirby in the Wild
Joseph Kadow
Photographer
Bradshaw's Guide
Tourist Train Guide (1866)
Kirby Enhanced 1
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There was a forum request for a plugin that adds unique IDs to structure field entries, so I created Kirby Structure ID. This is particularly useful if you want to store permanent references to structure field items in other pages (free).
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The Partial Cache plugin by Jens Tornell provides a helper function that makes it easy to cache "anything you want" in your Kirby project (free).
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Pedro Borges' Asset Cachebuster works similar to Kirby's Cachebuster plugin but returns an asset URL instead of link or script tags. It also supports preloading assets (free).
Always test third party plugins thoroughly before using them in production!
Kirby Enhanced 2
Image Annotator is a plugin that allows you to add notes to images by pinning them to specific coordinates. Click a point in an image and add the corresponding note. Created by Sylvain Julé (free).
Kirby in Style: Themes
Martin Folkers has ported three Jekyll themes to Kirby: Hyde, Poole and Lanyon. All three themes are free.
He also published Lingonberry, a Kirby port of a WordPress blog theme with lots of different post types (also free).
Resources
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Undraw is a collection of SVG illustrations you can use for free and without attribution in your projects.
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Sarah Drasner created the JS Array Explorer and Object Explorer tools that help finding the right functions when working – surprise, surprise – with JavaScript objects and arrays.
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The Glyphhanger tool by the Filament group automates creating subsets of fonts for faster font loading.
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Insomnia is a REST client for debugging APIs. The app is free and open source, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.
Performance
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The Filament group wrote about modern techniques for asynchronous CSS loading.
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New year, new checklists: Smashing Magazine has a pretty long, in-depth article on frontend performance for us.
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Jeremy Wagner provides three tips for faster font loading, one of them being subsetting fonts (and that's where the Glyphhanger utility I mentioned above might help with).
JavaScript
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Micromodal.js is a small configurable modal library in vanilla JavaScript. It enables you to create modal dialogs that are compliant with the WAI-ARIA guidelines.
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With Lozad.js, you can lazy-load images, iframes, ads, videos and more in pure JavaScript. It uses the IntersectionObserver API available in the latest browsers for faster performance.
CSS
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The Specificity Visualizer is an online tool that visualizes the specificity of selectors in your stylesheets.
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Sarah Soueidan wrote an article about using auto-sizing columns in CSS grid to achieve responsiveness without media queries.
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Jonathan Snook shows us how laying out events in a calendarcan become a less daunting task using CSS Grid Layout.
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In Accessible Footnotes with CSS, Hugo Giraudel explains how CSS counters can be used to create document footnotes.
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Learn how to prototype websites quickly by taking advantage of CSS Grid with Per Harald Borgen.
Visualization
- If you are interested in data visualizations, visit Nadieh Bremer's blog on her Visual Cinnamon website or subscribe to the newsletter to get regular updates of her awesome work.
Privacy
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A known vulnerability in browser's built-in password managers allows third party scripts to collect personal data like usernames or even passwords from site visitors to track them on the web. The article lists installing ad blockers or using browsers that allow you to disable auto-filling of forms (Firefox) as measures to protect yourself.
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Looks like we are facing even more threats to our private information from new classes of timing attacks. Be prepared to update your browsers and OSs.
This & That
- The TLDR pages aim to simplify the standard man pages with practical examples for the most common UNIX, Linux, macOS, SunOS and Windows commands.