Top picks — 2023 August
ffmpeg.app
If you have ever worked with the ffmpeg CLI, you know how cumbersome it can be with the number of flags and parameters. Thanks to the hard work of Zeh Fernando, we can now work with ffmpeg using a web app. It supports fuzzy search for basic commands and simplifies input/output parameters with a nice UI.
A deep dive into CSS color-mix()
I love Kevin’s YouTube channel. It is one of the very few CSS-related resources that I follow nowadays. Recent additions to colors in CSS can be overwhelming because there are many of them. The color-mix() is one of the most powerful features of modern color-related CSS features and one of the most confusing simultaneously. Kevin did a fantastic job in this 18-minute video explaining how it works. I highly recommend watching it and subscribing to his channel.
Four new CSS features for smooth entry and exit animations
Plenty of new features in pure CSS make entering and exiting transitions much easier than ever before. Most of these new features eliminate the need for complex JavaScript logic. Very cool!
GPTBot
I am going to leave the conversation about ChatGPT for another day, but I just wanted to mention that you can disable all the crawlers from indexing your website easily using your robots.txt file.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
Vercel: Our Official Hosting Partner
Another significant partnership between Vercel and a popular framework. Astro, one of the most exciting new frameworks, has quickly gained much traction. It now joins the group of officially supported frameworks by the creators of Next.js. It’s a bit concerning that Vercel is gradually becoming a monopoly in the JAMstack space (is JAMstack still a thing?).
Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational
The most influential pieces ever written about web design and development are conveniently put together in one place. Thanks, Zach.