Kirby Kosmos Episode 30

Originally published via email on December 7, 2018.

How fast this year has gone by. And this is already our 30th episode of Kirby Kosmos 🎉. Here is 2018 in Kirby numbers:

14 live streams
11 Kirby 3 Alphas
6 Kirby 3 Betas
52 Nightly Builds
4 Kirby 2 releases
3 Kirby workshops
~ 400 K-Next supporters
43.286 Slack Messages 😱
> 9000 forum posts
1.154 closed v3 tickets
2.294 commits
34+ Kirby 3 plugins
503 Kirby plugins altogether

Our contributors section on the new Kirby website is still all male. So if as a woman you have contributed to Kirby Next, keep me company.

Our developers have been busy and created shiny new plugins for the upcoming Kirby 3 version. Those of you using Sylvain Julé's plugins in their Kirby 2 projects, will probably be happy to hear that the following plugins have been ported to Kirby 3:

Kirby Imageradio
Kirby Imageboxes
Kirby Annotator
And there's also a new one by the same developer: Kirby Locator

Many more are already available. Check them out in the Kirby plugins repo and filter by Kirby 3.

Always test third party plugins thoroughly before using them in production.

Kirby Themes

If you are not so much into developing and still want a Kirby based website, you can always use a third party theme to get you started. The latest kid on the block is the Pedesa theme by Aristotheme.

Kirby How-tos

Brendan Dawes has written about how to create a simple Email to Blog Gateway for Kirby.

Cryptography

Svetlin Nakov is writing a book about practical cryptography for developers. Not quite finished yet, but online and free.

Security

Uncritically including third party scripts in your projects can be dangerous, as the Event Stream incident recently showed again. Details about the incident were posted on the npm blog last week. In his article "Exploiting Developer Infrastructure Is Ridiculously Easy", Jarrod Overson sees big problems in an Open Source system where people build software for free and are expected to continue to do so forever.
While there are strong reasons to make websites secure, this also has its downsides by making them less accessible or even inaccessible in regions with limited internet access, as Eric A. Meyer explores in this article.
In "Securing Your Site like It’s 1999", Katie Fenn forges a bridge from bad input validation in the early days of the web (still valid today!) to the new dangers we are facing today with ubiquitous npm scripts and the Internet of Things in our homes, and what we can do to protect our projects or ourselves.CSS

CSS

Animation 101 is a (free) book by Donovan Hutchinson, about, well, animating with CSS but also JavaScript, and including accessibility considerations.
With all the talk about new CSS features like CSS Grid, we sometimes forget that there are things like absolute positioning that might be the ideal solution to a specific problem, provided we understand how to use them. This article has you covered.
Heydon Pickering's latest video (definitely worth watching!), is a guide to making and wrapping shapes in CSS using things like border-radius, clip-path, the CSS Shapes spec, and paint worklets.

Images

Ire Aderinokun explains why and how to use WebP images today.

Typography

What is font kerning and how to do it with CSS, illustrated in this guide to kerning.
Zach Leatherman discusses why a JavaScript approach to font loading is still worthwhile even though browser support for new and safer CSS-only strategies has improved considerably.

This & That

The Christmas season is the time of Advent Calendar sites. Rachel Andrew has put together a collection of calendars for web designers and developers.
GitHub Actions allow you to create tasks to share with others, for example to automate your workflow or connect your project's services. Check out Sarah Drasner's collection of GitHub Actions.
humaaans is a library of people illustrations you can download for free and mix and match as you want.