Thursday, June 4, 2026

Howdy #WebDev friends! Whew, I sure have been a busy beaver lately. Right out of the gate…I just arrived at Public Beta status for a new open source theme for Bridgetown (more on that below) called Willamette. There’s a lot there I believe is of interest regarding how the theme was developed (more on that below), and I had a lot of fun reaching for a few newer CSS techniques to make layouts flexible and navigation fast.

Some big news is coming! 😲 Long-time readers will remember the CSS course I released a few years ago called CSS Nouveau. It’s free now, but it started out paid as part of the launch of Intuitive+.

While I don’t intend to get back into writing courses per se (plus “The Spicy Web” as an entity has had its day), I am definitely getting back into working on educational web dev material that will be available exclusively through Intuitive+, accessible via That HTML Blog. 🙌 These bite-sized morsels will start to roll out on a regular basis, taking all of the things I talk about on That HTML Blog and in the Human Web Collective Discord to the next level. First up: maintaining state of various UI elements across document navigations (perfect for static sites & for pairing with View Transitions). You’ll start to see these arriving for members later next week. I hope you consider joining Intuitive+! 😊

And now, on with the links…

Generate a Color Scheme Out of a Single Color

Until fairly recently, there was no way to get an entire color scale live generated based on one color using vanilla CSS.

You could do something like it at build-time using SASS. Or you could do something like it “live” using JavaScript—but purely for demo/one-off purposes.

However, now that we have real CSS functions calculating color math in real-time, we have the ability set a single color in a stylesheet—and everything else will come along for the ride!

Designing an Autogenerated Live Color Scale in CSS | That HTML Blog

Color palettes which are manually designed will always be superior (yes, humans still beat automation!)…but you can get pretty close.

Frameworks Funded & Released

So much going on with content-centric web frameworks right now!

First, we have Astro 6.4 out with a fully-customizable Markdown pipeline, as well as a new Rust-based Markdown processor option (so…fast! 🚀). That’s on top of a recent 6.3 release offering an experimental advanced routing system.

Next, the Build Awesome (née Eleventy) Kickstarter weathered its previous bumpy launch & subsequent takedown due to email infrastructure failures to get successfully funded in round two! Build Awesome will continue to offer its an open source core, but with the extra funding they’ll be working on new Pro features centered around collaborate editing, live previews, and professionally-designed templates.

And finally, the framework yours truly works on, Bridgetown, just released its version 2.2 featuring wikilinks support and the new fast-performing Falcon server. On top of that, thanks to the Gem Fellowship grant awarded to Bridgetown at the start of the year, the Bridgetown Center plugin program launched, as well as the aforementioned Willamette theme.

It’s awesome to see web standards-focused, indie web-aligned, open source software funded & supported like this!

Human-Made Cuz Slop Fade

And finally…lots of people (including me!) have been making “No AI” icons & symbols to use in their blogs, portfolios, etc. But I particularly like this one I found by Christopher Kirk-Nielsen which sits well within text like other symbols such as © or §.

I made a quick CodePen using the <wa-icon> component from Web Awesome showing how one might use it. But of course you could use either an <img> tag pointing to the SVG file or embed the SVG directly using your preferred CMS technique of choice.

And that’s all I got folks. See you here next week! (or thereabouts 😉)

Cheers,
Jared

🤔🌩️ Things that make you think: 💡😃

Just because Google stops being a web search engine, doesn’t mean people don’t need or want web search anymore.

Even—or especially!—in a world full of AI content and actors, people will be interested in human views, creativity, and connection. This is a demand that will not go away, regardless of what Google says or does. If Google pivots away from web search (with web links), someone else will step in—and there may be real opportunities here in terms of choice, ethics, and quality. Maybe we will experience a renaissance of web search engines!

–Jens Oliver Meiert