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New post: No-code website builders compared: From landing pages to ecommerce

Yes, I am a web developer and I love building websites. I also strongly believe that everyone should have a personal website where they can establish who they are and their personal brand. However, not everyone has those skills. Or maybe they have the skills but not the time. So, I evaluated several no-code website builders to come up with options for that crowd. Check it out.

New Theme Vitals features

Support this newsletter and my community work on Github Sponsors, Ko-fi, or Patreon.

New post: Leveraging tech communities for your career

It all started with slightly salty post about the state of LinkedIn hustler culture as it pertains to web performance. The main point was that web performance isn't easy, but I also mentioned the community. At least one person thought it sounded like gate-keeping. That wasn't my intention. Another person asked for advice for getting into the community.

So, I figured I'd write up a post about how to leverage tech communities for your career. Tech communities give so much. It might feel like "work" to contribute to them, but you're also improving:

Support this newsletter and my community work on Github Sponsors, Ko-fi, or Patreon.

Website redesign

At 4:30pm on Friday, May 30, I deployed my new website redesign. I'll write a post on it sometime. It took a lot of work because I wanted to rebrand/change the message, redesign, and figure out a way to combine my other content with my blog.

Lesson learned: Don't make major new features along with a redesign. 😅

Friends! A quick aside before we get into content updates...

❤️ I love supporting our tech (& art) communities through community organizing as well as writing and speaking on tech topics.

HOWEVER, I'm a freelancer so I don't get paid 💸 to do any of this! I'm looking to get sponsors to help make this more sustainable.

Help me hit my goal!

How I built Shopify Theme Vitals using 11ty and CrUX (new article!)

In case you missed it, I built a site called Theme Vitals which shows how Shopify themes perform in terms of the Core Web Vitals and other metrics. It was a pretty big undertaking, and I wrote up how I built it using HTTP Archive, the Chrome User Experience Report, BigQuery, Node, and 11ty. Check it out: How I Built Shopify Theme Vitals.

Web performance virtual meetup

We held the first meetup for PerformanceObserver! The website is now fully up as well as the YouTube channel. Check them out and subscribe if you're interested in web performance content!

My top content in 2024 (new article!)

I just published my 2024-in-review post for my technical blog content. Predictably, it's mostly about web performance and the indie web.

Shopify Theme Vitals updates

I've continued building out my new website that presents Core Web Vitals performance data by Shopify theme: themevitals.com. I got some great feedback on understandability, so I redesigned it a bit and added more copy. I've also added aggregations across all themes.

Dynamic social share images using Cloudinary (new article!)

I've used Cloudinary on my personal site for years now. It's made generating and serving responsive images so much easier (see my post on this).

I also use it for generating social graph images like this:

I just spoke about this topic at the 11ty meetup and decided to write it up as well for a broader audience. I can't wait to extend it even more in the future to add any article header images, which I tease how near the end. Read now...

Migrating from Netlify to Cloudflare for AI bot protection (new article!)

Before writing new content on my site, I wanted to better protect it from AI bots and scrapers. My blog is part of my marketing strategy. People find out about my services through first reading my articles. Whatever you think of LLMs, from a business perspective it does not make strategic sense for me if they copy and reuse my content.

In this article, I covered the steps I went through to migrate my hosting platform to take advantage of a new service by Cloudflare to block AI bots. Read now...

New blogroll page

Hey folks, it's been a while! I missed you during my whirlwind 2 years at Shopify. Now I'm back to (hopefully paid) freelancing and (sadly unpaid) content creation.

I'm getting back into the swing of things, starting with this newsletter...

The state of social media

I have learned the unfortunate news that LinkedIn is apparently hopping for professional social media. Luckily Mastodon is still a solid place for my fellow nerd engagement. I'm also on Bluesky but use it mostly for 💩 posts (so beware). Anyway, this means I need to learn how to use LinkedIn better - if you have tips, please share!

The resurgence of RSS

With the downfall of Twitter has come a resurgence of the IndieWeb and RSS. My blog has an RSS feed as well as this newsletter. If you're a fan of 11ty, the RSS plugin makes it easier to create a feed of your posts. Does your site have an RSS feed? If so, reply with the link so I can subscribe to it!

Performance.now() Amsterdam

It was wonderful to travel and hang out with people again at performance.now(). This was the first time I got to meet web perf people in person and had a blast. I also met my team, and my boss gave me this cute double decker bus for my LEGO city. I call it the cat bus since it's not minifig scale. 😀🐈

Hey folks, this week I have a few livestreams for you and a new article...

Key web performance metrics

I'm working on a performance-focused website for Shopify. Currently, it's an experiment and we'd love for it to get wider adoption. We're going to focus the content on web performance in general but also specific to Shopify. Since we'll have a lot of merchants use it, we need to have some beginner-friendly content. As such, one of the first articles I wrote for it is a beginner's guide to the key web performance metrics in 2022. Let me know what you think of the site and the article!

Recording from last week's web perf panel

Hey folks, it's been a while! Things have been cooking in my world lately and I'm finally coming up for air. My biggest news is that I started a new job at Shopify helping merchants with their web performance. I'm excited for the opportunity to impact performance on a larger scale. On that note...

State of Web Performance livestream today!

In just a few hours, I'll be participating on a panel with other folks in the industry. Sign up now so you can check us out at 12:00 pm Eastern today.

performance.now() conference is back!

Serverless Ecommerce Store content - now all in one place!

Matthew Ling and I did a series of livestreams where we build out a digital download shop using Eleventy, Stripe, Netlify, and more. First it was a meetup talk, then the livestreams, then 3 companion articles. Now you can finally find them all in one place in my new blog post!

Check it out: Building a Serverless E-commerce Store with Stripe, Netlify, & 11ty

The Woes of CSS

Hey folks, times are a bit rough in the world right now. If you need a bit of a distraction, I've got some new content for you...

Building a serverless e-commerce site with Eleventy, Netlify, and Stripe

All video recordings are now finished for the 3-part series I did with Matthew Ling from Stripe. I had been wanting to build out a shop for my sia.studio so that I can sell digital downloads. It was a fun little project using Eleventy, Netlify serverless functions, Stripe for payments, AWS for signed URLs, and Sendgrid for emails. And, all of it is free or near free for hosting!

We might make a later series to continue building out a shopping cart and upsells. What would you like to see built? At some point, I hope to write up tutorials for all of this too on the blog. In the meantime, you can check out all three episodes here:

Hey folks! This week I have a few updates on the big e-commerce site livestream series...

Livestream this Friday

I'm super excited to share that I'm doing a series of 3 livestreams with Matthew Ling to show how to build a serverless e-commerce store for digital downloads!

The first stream is this Friday at 1pm Eastern on Youtube. The link lets you set a reminder too if you like.

Digital e-commerce talk for the Eleventy Meetup

I'm excited to share a new talk and project with you! I'm building out a shop for my arts/crafts website for digital downloads. One of my hobbies was to design crochet patterns and create coloring pages. I have shops on Etsy but always wanted to self-host one as well (IndieWeb, amiright?).

The talk is on February 10 at 1pm Eastern - you can get all the details on the Eleventy Meetup site.

It's a sneak peek into a longer video or live stream series that I'm working on with my friend Matt Ling from Stripe. So stay tuned for that info too!

Hey folks! I'm busy working on a new contract which is exciting, but it's left less time for making new content sadly. In the meantime, here are my top 5 posts of 2021 based on analytics. Enjoy!

Coming in at #5, we have an intro to understanding how to use and design data in Eleventy, Architecting data in Eleventy. It walks through setting and using data in the static site generator Eleventy so that you can better understand the possibilities for architecting your web app.

Rolling in at #4 is another post albeit newer about Eleventy, Itsiest, Bitsiest Eleventy Tutorial. You might have heard a lot of buzz about Eleventy but maybe are a bit intimidated by some of the resources. Want just a small taste of it? Here's my quick, scaled-down tutorial.

Now we're getting into the heavy-hitters. Rounding out #3 in the top 5 is my long-form post on render-blocking resources. I wrote this because existing articles at the time seemed confusing for most folks, and it's often a big contributor to slow sites: How to Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources: a Deep Dive.

Hi folks,

It's been over 3 months since the hurricane and my last newsletter to you. That finally changes today! It's amazing what stable shelter will do for you. Let's jump right in.

Web Almanac 2021: Performance

I'm excited that we finally launched the 2021 Web Almanac! I wrote the Performance chapter. It was a lot of work during a tough time in my life, so I'm particularly proud that we made it across the finish line. This year, we had access to ranking data which opened up some new insights. Check it out for insights into the Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) plus TTFB and FCP. I included a deep-dive into the LCP element and also some CMS data associations which were enlightening. Check out all the chapters - there is so much great content!

Build that blog already!

I wrote a new post but didn't tell y'all about it because a whole hurricane happened since then. Want some inspiration to finally build that blog of yours? Check out Build that blog already.

Hurricane Ida

This is non-technical but life content. Unfortunately, it's my entire life at the moment so bear with me as I take a moment to share my story and some info.

New Eleventy Blog Starter

In my last newsletter, I mentioned that I'm giving a mini workshop on building and deploying an Eleventy blog. I forked the eleventy-base-blog, which was my original starting point, and made some opinionated changes:

• Uses a /src/ directory
• Moves most filters to a separate file to clean up the config file
• Adds more filters commonly used by me
• Inlines and minifies CSS by default
• Uses a more accessible color scheme for code blocks, and uses CSS variables so it's easier to switch it up.
• Adds RSS link to navigation
• Uses a responsive font size and flow system that is more readable, partially based on Improve the readability of the content on your website by Andy Bell
• Adds a footer at the bottom of the viewport
• Centers post article column, with wider image and code blocks, similar to the Hylia starter

Like the sound of that? You can preview a build and checkout out the GitHub repo. The event is on Tuesday if you still want to join.