The Spinneret: Issue #12

And so begins the process of transforming the website from a traditional blog to a more focused learning and resource center.

My Updates

Notable changes in my life, on my website, and in other projects.

The big news this month is that I finally got back into writing some code for my site. This month and next are mostly behind-the-scenes features, but there are exciting things to come.

Work is planned for about the next year and will result in an entirely new experience, one that I hope is better for you. It will no longer be just a blog, but will act as a more cohesive learning and resource center for developers (mostly front-end devs).

My Words

New blog posts and videos I published last month.

The Jamstack Journey: A Guide on Transforming an Idea into a Website was a culmination of several posts and a lot of work. It's the first significant milestone for me at Stackbit. But I'm mostly excited because now I can move on and pump out other posts on website-building best practices.

Astro: Build faster apps with less JavaScript is a piece I wrote for LogRocket. (LogRocket's blog practice is impressive.) This was my chance to really dig into Astro, and I'm in love!

5 Reasons I'm Excited about Astro was a precursor article I wrote when working on the Astro tutorial. It's my argument for 1) why I think Astro is great, and 2) why you may not need to immediately jump from 11ty if that's your current SSG of choice.

And a few others:

My Reads

Articles and news I read last month that I found interesting, with some commentary.

Nuxt v3 is being released in mid-October and Gatsby 4 is now in public beta! This is significant because both tools are following in the footsteps of Next.js and introducing a hybrid model, where you can choose whether a page should be server-side or statically rendered. We're a long way from where the Jamstack began, but these evolutions mean more power in the hands of developers (especially front-end developers), and I think that's a good thing.

Reducing Carbon Emissions On The Web is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Writing code and building websites feels like working in this magical, weightless space that just works. But everything we do on the web still requires electricity, it's just not right in front of us.

Jekyll doesn't do components? Liar! I've been working with Katie for a couple months and I absolute love her perspective and her tenacity to keep cranking out content. We talked a lot about this post because it reminded me of one I wrote for CSS-Tricks earlier in the year. It's useful to remember that a component is just a reusable piece of code that helps your UI come together. It doesn't have to be React or Vue or Svelte to be have value.

And a handful more:

My Finds

New tools that I've recently discovered. They aren't necessarily new.

Descript is an all-in-one audio & video editing, as easy as a doc. I've been playing around with this and I really like it. It's not necessarily great for every type of video, but it's a handy tool. It's also the lowest cost transcription service I've found, although you'll absolutely have to edit the results.

kbar is a simple plug-n-play React component to add a fast, portable, and extensible command+k interface to your site. It caught my attention because I'm a nerd and I love keyboard shortcuts.

OpenMoji is an open source emojis for designers, developers and everyone else!

Franz is a messaging app for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram and many many more.

Like Franz, Rambox claims to be the best way to organize your workspace. Sharing both because a coworker said he recently got frustrated with Franz's pricing model and switched to Rambox.

PRPL is a modular static site generator built for longevity. It lets you interpolate content with a single HTML element. (Oh look, another SSG on the scene.) 😅

That's all for this month. See you soon!

As always, I welcome feedback on this newsletter (and any content I put out there). Say hello on Twitter.