April 7, 2025

Fox Kits and Magic ID's

Hey friends,

For the third year in a row, we've had foxes den and kits in our backyard. Check out these little guys!

We're giving them plenty of space and respect as wild animals, but it's still really neat to watch them grow from afar!

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Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Ever been creating a component for a build and — oh drat, you need a unique ID for aria labels. So you reach for a unique string generator and..

But wait! There are other ways!

Alpine has a neat $id property that helps you create an ID context to ensure unique ID's that never repeat, without the random strings.

And if you're in Rails, you can use the dom_id helper to do the same thing.

Pretty neat!

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Interesting Web Bits 🍿

Web Stuff

• A CSS-only blurry image placholder approach.
• If you've thought to yourself, "Oh, how I miss the Windows95 aesthetic...", well then Blue95 has you covered.
• Huh, I guess don't set --rem on :root unless you want all Grammarly add-on users to see a broken version of your site.
• I had never heard of computer programs downloaded from the radio 📻
• Monterail released a State of Vue Report for 2025 which states Vue 3 adoption is ... happening but still the largest pain point in upgrading from Vue 2. Also Vapor Mode.
• The WebKit team brings a new concept called Item Flow to the masonry/grid/flexbox party.
• Anime.js is out with a v4 and a spiffy new homepage.

Other Stuff

• Michael Lynch tells us how to improve our writing readability by being clear about who it's for, the value of reading, and making it skimmer-friendly.
• You have 13 circles... now make an animal!.
• Is the world losing color?. Maybe in human spaces, but nature... uh... still finds a way.
• A fun story of an old April Fools involving printers.
• Yeah, my stove keeps trying to connect to my WiFi too...