Craig Buckler

Layoutit Terra - CSS Terrain Generator An interactive CSS terrain generator. Define a grid and generate your terrain!

CSS Terrain Generator
terra.layoutit.com/

Very clever. While I'm not sure you could use it for anything practical, the options, copy-able URL, iframe embedding, and Codepen export is something many more code generators should offer.

State of JavaScript 2025 Take the State of JavaScript survey

The State of JS 2025 survey is now open!...
survey.devographics....

(Has it really been a year since the last one???)

Helium Browser The web browser made for people, with love. Best privacy by default, unbiased ad-blocking, no bloat and no noise. Fully open source.

New browser alert...
helium.computer/

It's based on Chromium with privacy features and uBlock Origin built in.

It looks OK and is quite fast, but it's an alpha with little to differentiate it from Chromium yet. Worth keeping an eye on.

Web Tools #630 - JS Utilities, Build Tools, Uncats JavaScript Utilities, Build Tools & Bundlers, and The Uncategorizables (misc. tools).

StaticSearch is featured in WebToolsWeekly 630:
mailchi.mp/webtoolsw...

Many thanks @LouisLazaris!

It started because Publican.dev needed search, but has become more popular. I've just bought staticsearch.com - new site and example code coming soon.

StaticSearch v0.5.0 update StaticSearch now supports more languages and can limit results to pages containing some or every search word.

StaticSearch v0.5.0 has been released:
publican.dev/news/st...

It adds search facilities to any static site.
This update allows you to show pages that include:

- any search term (logical OR)
- all search terms (logical AND), or
- a minimum percentage of search terms.

Simple Live Reload:
leanrada.com/notes/s...
github.com/Kalabasa/...

It doesn't need a special server, proxy, SSE, WS etc.

The PerformanceObserver API gets all resources. A HEAD fetch polls every second and reloads the page on Last-Modified or ETag changes. Nice approach.

Whatever the rights, wrongs, pros, and cons of the UK Online Safety Act and Government transparency...

Should Ofcom really be publishing a list of adult sites they're investigating because they haven't implemented age verification checks?!

It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA:
www.jonoalderson.com...

SPAs were never necessary for websites. Ask Wordpress.

SPA techniques often go too far for apps. Separate sections (dash, data tables, settings, etc) can be better as pages with progressively enhanced Ajax.

Excel is 40 years old, yet it still can't open two files that have the same name.

The Hamburger-Menu Icon Today: Is it Recognizable? Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply.

The Hamburger-Menu Icon Today: Is it Recognizable?
www.nngroup.com/arti...

TLDR: yes.

It claims hamburger icons should be in the top-left corner.
I thought top-right was used more?
BBC, Gov.uk, Nodejs.org...
Perhaps that's just the sites I visit?

Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to c…

Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs
by Nolan Lawson
nolanlawson.com/2025...

Absolutely. You won't remember what those 57 <div>s are doing within three days. Semantic HTML is mostly accessible out of the box. If you break it, you should take a long hard look at your code.

npm: staticsearch Simple static site search system.. Latest version: 0.2.1, last published: 4 days ago. Start using staticsearch in your project by running `npm i staticsearch`. There are no other projects in the npm registry using staticsearch.

I wasn't happy with static site search engines so I rolled my own!

Introducing StaticSearch: an easy-to-use, lightweight, client-side search engine:
www.npmjs.com/packag...

See it in action:
publican.dev/news/pu...

It's new but should be usable. Give it a go!

Email from Google following a 17% Workspace price hike...
"The updated subscription pricing reflects the significant added AI value".

They're not of "value" if I didn't ask for AI tools, don't use them, and can't remove them!

Yes, I know Safari is better these days but it's still a relief (and quite unusual) to test something and discover it works without further development effort.

I recently spent hours debugging flaky WebM video support.

I'm not a heavy VSCode Copilot user. It can be useful for some spicy auto-completes, but it's often noisy and distracting.

Despite disabling it on most stuff, I typically hit "Completions quota reached" after a week or two. It's a welcome relief. I may have to uninstall it.

Introducing: Webbed Sites A video from Webbed Briefs

Another brilliant video from @heydonworks.com:
briefs.video/videos/...

I wonder where the inspiration came froma?
You'll be singing the <DIVS> song all day.

booky.io | Online bookmark manager. Online bookmark manager which is simple, individual, private, and fast.

If you're looking for a post-Pocket bookmarking tool, I've been using https://booky.io/ for a few weeks.

It works everywhere, looks great, and offers a bookmarklet to add posts. No unnecessary app or AI nonsense.

Mozilla is shutting down the Pocket bookmark/reading service:
support.mozilla.org/...

It was a nice enough tool and got heavy promotion. That said, I had a dozen old articles stored so I clearly wasn't using it.

I won't miss Pocket.
I still miss Google Reader, though.

May TechExeter Meetup , Thu, May 15, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup **10+ year retro special** Join us (for FREE!) at Positive Light Projects on Sidwell Street for a mix of interesting short talks and networking, plus FREE PIZZA 🍕🍕🍕 cou

It's TechExeter's +10th anniversary meetup on Thursday 15 May, 7pm...
www.meetup.com/teche...

It's techy. It's in Exeter UK. It's free. There's pizza.
What's not to like?
Yeah, OK, I'm speaking.

May TechExeter Meetup , Thu, May 15, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup **10+ year retro special** Join us (for FREE!) at Positive Light Projects on Sidwell Street for a mix of interesting short talks and networking, plus FREE PIZZA 🍕🍕🍕 cou

I'm speaking at TechExeter's 10th anniversary meet-up this Thursday in Exeter, UK. Don't let that put you off...
www.meetup.com/teche...

Thanks! Good to see you here too!

11ty is great- I've used it a lot.
I wrote Publican because I wanted:

1. simpler ${ js-in-template-literal-expressions } rather than a template syntax
2. automatic index and tag pagination
3. useful functionality and fewer dependencies.

Let me know if you try it.

Publican 0.8.0 has been released. It's my simple HTML-first static site generator for super-fast websites:
publican.dev/news/publica...

I've also created a basic theme to demonstrate features get you started:
publican-theme-basic.pages.dev

Drop me a line if you create your own site or theme.

livelocalhost localhost development server with live reloading. Latest version: 1.0.1, last published: 2 minutes ago. Start using livelocalhost in your project by running `npm i livelocalhost`. There are no other p...

Just released livelocalhost - a development server to serve static files from any directory, watch for changes, and hot reload. Effectively, it's a lightweight Browsersync:
www.npmjs.com/package/live...

Run it from the command line or use in Node.js modules. Publican.dev examples coming soon!

Publican v0.7.0 has been released:
publican.dev/news/publica...

The static site generator now supports markdown-it plugins for more control over MD to HTML conversion.

Yeah, very few mentions of Top Secret! Loved it. Far better than Top Gun, too.

Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft. Browse securely now.

What the hell is this, Microsoft?!
I'm using Edge and browsing a Google site.

Exactly what "added trust" am I getting? You've clearly examined where I'm browsing and incorrectly concluded I'm downloading another browser. I wasn't anywhere near Chrome's download page!

AI options in Notepad

You must be kidding me...
Windows Notepad now has Copilot AI integration.

Ah thanks! I was only thinking that earlier.

Yeah, it was well hidden. Shame really - it's one of the better additions to this release.

January 2025 (version 1.97) Learn what is new in the Visual Studio Code January 2025 Release (1.97)

VS Code 1.97 now previews SVG images.

I suspect I'll find that much more useful than all the AI stuff.

code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_97