Episode 67
The Corona crisis and now the terrible war in Ukraine have taken the focus off the climate crisis, which is already threatening the lives of many people today. And yet it will not simply disappear. What all these crises have in common is that we as individuals cannot solve them; they need global political & economical conditions and decisions.
But if we don't want to be paralyzed from shock and frozen from fear, we can act on whatever small the scale. Whether we donate to humanitarian aid in Ukraine or take care of refugees, whether we turn down the heating or leave the car parked. Or whether we, as web developers, try to build more sustainable websites.
To us at Kirby it is important to create a product that is as lean as possible. And that's why we want to focus more on these critical aspects in the documentation in the coming weeks and months. Today we start with a cookbook recipe on image lazyloading that will help save a lot of data transfer, and with a sustainability special in this newsletter.
Kirby 3.6.6
22 commits, some closed issues and several new features: Kirby 3.6.6 is here.
Kirby in the wild
Kirby plugins & tools
With the Recently Modified section, your users see immediately which pages were recently modified.
Check keywords and get term suggestions with Kirby Seobility, a plugin based on the seobility.net service (requires paid account for all features).
Consent Gate blocks the loading of content from external sources until the users give their consent.
Autoloader for Kirby is a Composer package (not a Kirby plugin) that serves as a helper to automatically load Kirby extensions in a plugin.
Cookbook
Considerably improve your site's performance with lazy-loading. Our new cookbook recipe introduces different options.
Why does Kirby use a separate media folder to store files? An explainer.
About Kirby
Why we are switching from WordPress to Kirby: An in-depth comparison of features.
Performance
Adrian Bece explains how the new fetchpriority attribute will enable us to fine-tune relative resource priority.
Reduce the impact of images on your site's performance with perfect images and the modern img element.
Special: Sustainable web design
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud summarizes 5 years of research in server farms. The carbon footprint of the cloud today exceeds that of the airline industry.
As web developers, we are part of this industry and can do our share to help mitigate the effects: from reducing data transfer by lazy-loading content, optimizing images, reducing dependencies etc. to choosing efficient and/or climate-neutral hosting, but also beyond the immediate climate effects taking into consideration society at large.
Sustainable web design provides information about what we can do to reduce the impact of our websites.
There are quite a few services today that allow you to measure the environmental impact of a website.
It should be noted that the results for a website can differ considerably between these services, and also how transparent (or not) they are about their criteria. Some of these services need an account and are paid.
Frontend
The times when people tried to cram as much text as possible into a given layout are luckily a thing of the past, and 16px fonts sizes have come to be widely adopted. However, the article Childish Font Sizes makes a case for using larger font sizes on the web.
Nils Binder explores several ways how to build a combined aspect-ratio grid.
A primer for creating different types of accessible lists.
Tools & libraries
Finding appropriate names for color variables can be daunting. The Color Name Generator returns a fancy color name for each color code you feed it.
Piku allows you to do git push deployments to your own servers. Think of it as a tiny Heroku alternative.
This & that
“Despite global reach, a huge part of the web is only tailored for western audiences – 52% of all websites are in English”. Internationalization and localization are important factors in making an inclusive web.
Mozilla published their vision for the evolution of the web that puts a focus on openness and safety, performance and accessibility, user control and sustainability.
Interesting read about envisioning build processes as progressive enhancementrather than dependencies.
Learning by lurking, "whereby we surround ourselves by smart people, sit back, take a long sip of a nice cup of shut the fuck up, and listen".
Reproof is a writing tool to be launched by mid-2022. For their blog, I answered some questions about my writing workflow.