Little Things on My Personal Site

I updated my personal website the other day. Always a fun project since it’s one of the few where it’s 100% just me. It’s my own personal playground with no other goal than making the site represent me to have a little fun. It’s not a complete re-write, just some new paint.

I thought I’d document little bits of it here just to hone in on some of the bits of trickery in the spirit of learning through sharing.

Screenshot of the entire length of the homepage of ChrisCoyier.net. Four major boxes of content: build-your-own bio in yellow, blog posts in purple, action items in red, and a video in blue.

Hoefler Fonts

I think the Inkwell family is super cool. I like mix and matching not just the weights but the serif and sans-serif and caps vs not.

I used Inkwell in the last design as well, but I was worried that it was a little too jokey for blog post body copy. My writing is extremely casual, but not always, and Inkwell is way too jovial for serious topics. I went with Ideal Sans for body copy last time, but the pairing with Inkwell felt a little off.

This time I went with Whitney for general body copy, which is still pretty lighthearted, but works when the copy is more straight toned.

If you’re going to zebra-stripe a table, you’d do something like…

tr:nth-child(even) {
  background-color: var(--color-1);
}
tr:nth-child(odd) {
  background-color: var(--color-2);
}

What if you wanted to rotate four colors though? It’s still :nth-child trickery, selecting every four, and then offsetting. Here, I’ll do it with list items in Sass (the nesting is nice, not having to repeat the selector):

li {
  &:nth-child(4n) a {
    color: $blue;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 1) a {
    color: $yellow;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 2) a {
    color: $red;
  }
  &:nth-child(4n + 3) a {
    color: $purple;
  }
}

That’s what I did to build the colorized blogroll:

Note the Sass used above… I used Sass because it was already in use on the project. All I had to do was open CodeKit and the processing was ready-to-go.

Oh, and blogrolls are cool again.

Chill YouTube

I used this click-to-load-YouTube-(at all) technique which is still extremely clever. Having an <iframe> that behaves just like a YouTube embed would but only loading a simple static image (rather than heaps and heaps of resources) is great for performance and behaves essentially the same as a normal YouTube embed does.

<iframe
  width="560"
  height="315"
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ"
  srcdoc="<style>*{padding:0;margin:0;overflow:hidden}html,body{height:100%}img,span{position:absolute;width:100%;top:0;bottom:0;margin:auto}span{height:1.5em;text-align:center;font:48px/1.5 sans-serif;color:white;text-shadow:0 0 0.5em black}</style><a href=https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8Wp3dafaMQ?autoplay=1><img src=https://img.youtube.com/vi/Y8Wp3dafaMQ/hqdefault.jpg alt='Video The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition'><span>▶</span></a>"
  frameborder="0"
  allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
  allowfullscreen
  title="The Dark Knight Rises: What Went Wrong? – Wisecrack Edition"
></iframe>

Comparison of a YouTube embed and an iframe with just an image in side. Barely different at all, visually.

Custom Post Types everywhere

I’m a big fan of giving myself structured data to work with. In WordPress-land, that often means Custom Post Types paired with something like the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for just the right data needed for the job.

Three CMS input screens: Add New Conference (with conference related fields), Add New Interview, and Add New Action Item.

Then I can loop over stuff and output it however I want. This isn’t that fancy, but it opens up whatever future doors I want to a lot easier.

Build your own bio

There is nothing fancy about how this works:

Bio generator showing HTML for my personal bio. Radio buttons next to it to change 1st to 3rd person, length, and code type of bio.

I literally made 18 <div> elements (3 lengths * 2 styles * 3 code types = 18) and swap between with a bit of JavaScript that calculates a class string based on the current choices, selects that class, and unhides it while hiding the rest.

$(".bio-choices input").on("change", function () {
  var lengthClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=length]:checked").attr("id");
  var styleClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=style]:checked").attr("id");
  var codeClass = ".bio-" + $("input[name=code]:checked").attr("id");
  var selector = lengthClass + styleClass + codeClass;

  $(".bio").hide();
  $(selector).show();
});

jQuery! That’s what was already on the site, and the site also uses the jQuery version of FitVids for responsive videos — so I figured I’d just leave it all be.

If I was going to re-write these bits of the site, I’d probably rip out jQuery and use this for FitVids. Then I’d find a way to only have three bios (maybe six if I can’t find a nice way to handle first vs. third person with word swaps) and then get the rest by automatically converting the formats somehow (maybe some cloud function if I had to).

ztext.js

I used ztext for the header! It’s this kinda stuff that makes the web feel extra webby to me. I’m not sure I’d do something with quite so much movement on a site like CSS-Tricks (because people visit it more often and the time-on-site is higher). But for a site that people might land on once in a blue moon, it has the right amount of cheerful levity, I think.

Background SVG

I was stoked to see the SVG Backgrounds site get an upgrade lately. I was playing around in there and was like YES, I’m doing this.

SVG backgrounds website showing off wavy dark gray lines over black, configurable through a controls panel.

I went with a background-attachment: fixed look, which I think I like. I also added the slideout footer effect on desktop, but I’m less sold that it’s working here. It’s more fun when the background changes, and that doesn’t happen here. I’ll probably either change the background of the footer, or rip the effect out.

Filter trick for links

Some of the different sections on the site use a different primary highlight color, and I’m having the links in those sections follow that color. That might be questionable (perhaps all links should be blue) but, so far, I think it makes decent sense (they still have hover and focus styles). When you have a variety of colors and styles for interactive elements though, it often means that you have to create special alternate styles for hover and focus. That could mean crafting bespoke color alterations for each color. Not the end of the world, but I really like this little trick for interactive styles that ends up with a consistent look across all colors:

a:focus, .button:focus,
a:hover, .button:hover {
  filter: brightness(120%);
}

Anyway! This was just a couple hours of paint on this site. Mostly because blogrolls were the CodePen Challenge that week. But I can never touch a site I haven’t in a while and just do one thing. I get sucked in and gotta do more!

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