Image transitions are a technique used to animate images as they appear on screen. Examples include scaling or fading the image into view for visual flare. However, often these transitions are implemented in a way that causes a large degradation in performance and thus user experience.
We worked with Case-Mate to fix this issue on their website, resulting in a 6 second improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)! In this case study, we’ll walk through the experience and the steps we went through to make this improvement.
Nice little review of JavaScript site generators by Zach. Couple standouts, to me:
Of the 7 generators tested, only Astro and Eleventy default to 0kb of client-side JavaScript. More 0kb baselines, please.
Three of the generators hide npm audit reports by default. (Basically, the opposite of “secure by default”)
Jeremy writing about Clearleft’s current conclusion around so-called “AI”:
There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs.
I think this sums up the way I’ve been feeling about it so far (though struggling to phrase it as succinctly).
Like most, I’ve played with ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar things, purely out of curiosity, and I’ve paid attention to the example outputs I’m seeing from others. For me, the output continues to fall into that camp of “pretty good for a piece of technology but definitely has a distinct ‘smell’ about it”.
I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind.
This. 100x, this.
I spent close to seven years in a marketing department on a content team as I wrote blog posts, ebooks, tweets, podcast episodes, magazine pieces, and slide decks among other things. Based on all that experience, I wanted to share some of the most important lessons I learned from my time there….
Drawing upon each model, I tried to roughly gauge the perf maturity of organizations, but found I needed a more visual aid — a map of perf work that I would help me identify where orgs are in their perf journey: what areas of performance there are and what level they are in those areas. So I drew up a “Performance Maturity Matrix” with four levels including a “null” level (i.e. lacking the traits of performance maturity) and nine areas of perf work.
It’s true that when you try to anticipate future harms, you won’t spot them all. But as the muscle gets stronger, your success rate improves and you develop better foresight senses. But even spotting some harms is preferable to not looking in the first place.
Owning your content on the web should not require extensive technical knowledge or special skills. It should be just as easy as signing up for a cellphone plan.
Max hits on the some of the same thoughts I’ve had regarding IndieWeb in the past. The whole Mastodon signup process was a stark reminder of the complexity involved. I consider myself a relatively smart person, but even with folks explaining it to me, I’m still not entirely clear on why I would choose one server over another and whether it matters at all. Choosing which server, for me, was just a moment of confusion and while it was a minor one that obviously didn’t stop me from signing up, it’s a point of friction that I’m sure puts an upper cap on Mastodon’s potential for growth.
But like Max, I’m not so convinced mass adoption should be the goal….for any social platform honestly.
I had been using Twitter less and less over the last few years. If you set out to design a platform with the intention of it encouraging increasingly divisive hot-takes, you’d be hard pressed to do a better job of it than Twitter. The brevity of the posts, the immediacy of the feed, the little micro-doses of dopamine from seeing your content shared and liked…all of it encourages off-the-cuff hot takes and discourages anything resembling constructive conversation.
Maybe this is an opportunity not to just reset our social feeds and own our content, but to re-consider the power of social media to connect us and explore what it might mean to design an experience that is more calm and considered.
I’ve been saving links to my site for years now (albeit sporadically) and have been telling myself pretty much the entire time that I should really make those auto-post somewhere.
Matthias wrote about a really straightforward way of sending RSS to Mastodon, so gonna give this a shot.
(This is actually the first test…fingers crossed!)
Good little case study on how YouTube optimized their First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint by applying preload and fetchpriority to their poster image.
My favorite nugget is that they tested using an actual video thumbnail for their poster image versus a solid black poster image, and the black image performed better in user studies:
Using a solid black poster image showed the best results in user studies. Users found the transition from solid black to the first frame of the video to be a less-jarring experience for autoplay videos.