Feed - Steven Woodson

Adding Bluesky Activity to an Eleventy Blog 🔗

I’ve been noticing so many folks adding Bluesky likes and comments to their personal blogs, after tacking on webmentions a while back I thought it’d b [...]

Why Every Client Relationship Matters More Now 🔗

Saying goodbye to a client is always tough, but as a freelance consultant, it feels profoundly different from my agency days. Back then, wrapping up a [...]

Fluid Font Size by Character Count 🔗

I recently had a use case where CMS provided headlines needed to reasonably fit into a well defined space within a hero section. The hope was to fill [...]

Practical Developer Tips for Digital Accessibility Advocacy 🔗

Hat tip to all the other digital accessibility focused folks out there, fighting the good fight to advocate, educate, and drive accessibility forward. [...]

Nuxt 2 to Astro 3 Replatforming – from Setup to Production 🔗

I keep hearing great things about Astro, and just so happened to have a personal project that I needed to move off of Nuxt 2 as its end of life date i [...]

Why Budgets are so Important for Software Development Projects 🔗

As a freelance web dev consultant, I’ve been having a whole lot of introductory conversations. They generally fit in one of a few categories: potentia [...]

Web Components in Astro 🔗

I’ve recently been jumping into learning more about Astro, using a personal project that needs to be replatformed as an excuse to give it a try. The f [...]

Fighting Back Against Toxic Productivity 🔗

I received some great feedback from a recent social media post (on LinkedIn and Mastodon) about my sometimes unhealthy obsession with my todo list, I’ [...]

State of the Browser 2023 Conference Recap 🔗

Preamble I’ve been working on this recap in bits and pieces since the State of the Browser conference in September. Now that it’s already mid-October [...]

One of a Kind Business Cards 🔗

It’s been a while since I made some business cards, but I really wanted something to leave with folks I meet at conferences and meetups that would be [...]

Going Independent – Two Months In 🔗

I mentioned in the last post that I was considering only taking this through week 8. I’ve confirmed that desire, opting instead to focus on content th [...]

Eleventy Style Guide Generator – Step by Step guide adding to an existing site 🔗

I shared the Eleventy Style Guide Generator (source is on GitHub, here’s the demo site it generates, and an intro video from the September Eleventy me [...]

Pulling WordPress Post Categories & Tags Into Eleventy 🔗

TL;DR This is another part in a series of posts about WordPress content being pulled into Eleventy, including: Composable Architecture Powered by Word [...]

Eleventy Style Guide Generator with WebC Component Support 🔗

TL;DR I created an Eleventy style guide generator, features include: Automatically itemized JSON-formatted design tokens like colors, fonts, and fluid [...]

Going Independent – Week Four & Five Check in 🔗

Wow, five weeks already? I missed one so this is a roundup of the last two weeks. Here’s week 1, week 2, and week 3 if you’re interested. Let’s dive i [...]

Going Independent – Week Three Check in 🔗

Keeping the weekly check in train rolling! Here’s week 1 and week 2 in case you’re looking to catch up. What Happened Last Week I got a response back [...]

I Want To Be Known For… – Freelance Introspection 🔗

This is a follow up post from The Ideal Client and Project – Freelance Introspection, continuing my introspective journey as I iterate on my various o [...]

Going Independent – Week Two Check in 🔗

I’m following the same format I did in last weeks check in, it’s the simplest way to jot things down quickly and seemed to be well received as “easily [...]

The Ideal Client and Project – Freelance Introspection 🔗

I’ve realized there’s a surprising amount of introspection required when you decide to go freelance. One is to figure out “the ideal” client and proje [...]

Going Independent – Week One Check in 🔗

It’s been a week since I shared I’m focusing on full time freelance web dev, which was about a week after being let go from my previous full time posi [...]

Steve Woodson – Independent Web Development Consultant 🔗

TL;DR I’m terrible at burying the lede (as it’s the title of this post) so I’m starting with the TL;DR. I’m venturing out on my own offering freelance [...]

I Was Laid Off, Now What? 🔗

If you’ve been following the news lately, it’s been a rather tough time in technology this year. Not a week goes by without news of several major comp [...]

Intentional Attention – My Organization Strategy for Interesting Reads 🔗

I’m trying to be more intentional about reading through the backlog of cool projects, articles, and newsletters I collect throughout the day. Be it fr [...]

Plaid Swatch Generator 🔗

Sometimes you’ve gotta make time to build something fun, today I whipped up a Plaid Swatch Generator! Background I built up my personal branding cente [...]

How I Hacked My Brain to Let Myself Relax in the Evenings 🔗

Do you ever find yourself constantly on the go, always trying to be productive? I’ve struggled with this for most of my adult life, spending evenings [...]

Email Newsletters – My Emotional Response Spectrum and Organization Strategy 🔗

How’s that for a title? Basically, this is all about how I personally categorize newsletters, how that categorization has influenced how they’re organ [...]

CloudFront Function for basic auth, redirect, and serving from S3 🔗

I recently had the opportunity to rethink how some CDN customizations were happening within an Amazon AWS managed project. Previously, we had used a c [...]

Conserving Sentry Transactions by Ignoring Laravel Routes 🔗

Yet another case of trying to find an answer to a very particular problem, coming up empty, solving it myself, and posting about it for future generat [...]

Joining the IndieWeb with Webmentions and Microformats 🔗

I’ve finally spent some time setting up Webmentions and adding some Microformats formatting to this site! These technologies have been around for quit [...]

Adding a Table of Contents to dynamic content in 11ty 🔗

This is a follow up post to Pulling WordPress Content into Eleventy, I’ve also written about how to make use of WordPress post categories and tags too [...]

Solving Animation Layout Flickering Caused by CSS Transitions 🔗

I recently had the opportunity to redo the header section of an inherited codebase. Everything was going great, my version was nearly 30% less code, m [...]

A Step-by-Step Guide to Sorting Eleventy Global Data Files by Date 🔗

In Eleventy, there’s a lot of helpful built in methods to manage content sorting by date. But if you wanted to manage your static (or API-driven?) dat [...]

Getting Started in Technical Leadership 🔗

I’ve been given the immense privilege of leading projects and teams of various sizes over the years, and an equally immense amount of grace as I inevi [...]

Thought Experiment – Greatest Superpower and Biggest Weakness 🔗

It could be the nostalgic reflection that seems to come on at the end of the calendar year but I’m giving this some thought to see if it affects my go [...]

Pulling WordPress Content into Eleventy 🔗

This is a follow up on my previous post Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress, focused specifically on how to pull content from WordPress via t [...]

SSH “Server Key Changed” Error and How to Fix It 🔗

I’ve come across the following SSH server key error a handful of times while working within my local environments and every time I’ve had to look up w [...]

Making Intervention Image Ignore SVGs 🔗

I recently started seeing a recurring exception pop up on one of my sites related to resizing and caching of images, after a bit of digging I realized [...]

Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress 🔗

It’s inevitable that – as a developer – I continue to change my mind and feel the urge to tinker again and again. Like a pendulum swinging back and fo [...]

IAAP CPACC Exam Preparation and Reflection 🔗

Happy to say I recently checked off a pretty large goal off my list by achieving my CPACC certification! I sat for the exam in early February 2022 and [...]

Implementing Dark Mode 🔗

I love getting feedback from folks using the Be Inclusive app, my favorite feedback by far is actionable suggestions to make the app better. One such [...]

Alternatives for object-fit in IE11 🔗

The problem I recently came across an interesting issue where several prerequisites led to my turning to the object-fit CSS property to achieve the de [...]

Soft Skills: Productivity and Goal Setting 🔗

I wrote an earlier post called “Improving Your Emotional Intelligence,” which introduced the topic of soft skills and practical advice on how to incor [...]

Empathy in Web Accessibility 🔗

Today we celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day with an exploration into how building empathy is fundamental to improving our approach to web ac [...]

What the Font are Vertical Rhythm and Modular Scale? 🔗

Anyone that’s been in earshot of me has likely heard my ramblings about style guides, and a big part of that lately has been establishing a vertical r [...]

Soft Skills: Improving Your Emotional Intelligence 🔗

Who doesn’t want to make a difference in other people’s lives while also maintaining productivity? Proven soft skill techniques can make this seemingl [...]

The Four Levels of Mobile Browser Testing 🔗

If there’s one item that doesn’t change from project to project, it’s timelines and budgets. So how do we manage the growing complexity of development [...]

Managing Multi-Tenant Component Styles 🔗

In this article, we’re going to trace the path we took to accomplish a unique, cohesive design system for multiple sites within a single Content Manag [...]

Off-canvas Menu + Fixed Navbar = Buggy iOS Safari 🔗

While working on a responsive refresh of the Upshot website I came across some buggy behavior when mixing an off-canvas menu with a fixed position ele [...]

Avoiding Career Stagnation 🔗

As a web developer the potential for career stagnation – feeling stuck, idle, and lacking progression – is higher than average. With technology consta [...]

Filtering and Sorting a Table with PHP 🔗

I had a friend ask me earlier this week if I knew of any resources that could point him in the right direction on how to create a PHP page of tabular [...]

PHP Functions – Part 2 🔗

Pad, Reduce, Chunk I lumped these three functions together because I doubt I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve used any of them. Though [...]

Recharge & Release 🔗

I find that I go through productivity phases, generally the two I am most cognizant of are what I can loosely refer to as recharge and release. When r [...]

No Shame In Looking It Up 🔗

Web developers are tasked with remembering several different programming languages in order to effectively get the job done. HTML, CSS, & Javascript a [...]

PHP Functions – Part 1 🔗

I’ve been working with PHP for several years, dare I say a decade at this point, and I’m still surprised at functions I’ve never or rarely used. In an [...]

Apache 2GB file limit 🔗

Just came across a new issue I hadn’t dealt with before, apparently once a file (in my case a very large error_log file) reaches 2GB or 2,147,483,647 [...]

Steven Woodson