Bluesky

I killed comedy — it was me — I did it

next.js is the cybertruck of javascript frameworks in that it will also stop production

websites! www.npr.org/2026/10/30/n...

…wait

💫 the more you know:

1️⃣ most states in the US legally require employers to provide time off for you to vote: know your rights
2️⃣ you can fill in one oval and it counts as voting — so if you’re feeling overwhelmed you have my personal permission to be a single oval voter (just make sure you vote!)

I voted 🗳️🇺🇸

happy halloween, ya filthy animals

filed a few followups to this, for interested folks:

github.com/11ty/elevent...
github.com/11ty/plugin-...

uh… I guess I knew y’all were going to remove XSLT but is a user-level error for it really the tact you want to take here? 🥵

worth noting in case it isn’t clear: this isn’t the fault of the developer team, this is a funding and resource allocation issue

anyway I hope the cia.gov gatsby website is doing ok

A little hard to believe that 116 of 133 (87%!) packages in the Gatsby ecosystem are currently flagged by npm audit (official, not community packages; not deprecated)

I’ve heard of maintenance mode but I don’t know if this counts 🫣

Worth remembering that Next.js internally bundles 136MB of dependencies in its package output (see https://npmx.dev/package-code/next/v/16.4.3/dist%2Fcompiled) so even though an npm audit (on v16.4.3) reports 0 vulnerabilities, it actually has 32 unreported (some might argue hidden) vulnerabilities.

Credit where credit is due: the @angular.dev team keeps their npm audit house in order! 2 of 47 packages with outstanding audits is *really* good.

I don’t use static websites for the same reason I love my smart TV: it’s always better to have more connectivity and more features and I don’t have to make any tradeoffs asserting this

Congrats to Dave Shea (of CSS Zen Garden!) for their new #BuiltAwesome website! 🏆

https://daveshea.com/journal/don-t-call-it-a-comeback/

having a very negative reaction to seeing any condensed serif right now and I know it’s unfair — for me the political bias of Instrument Serif has now leaked into the rest of the category 🥵

11y/o just told me that a septic tank is just a fancy chamber pot and I am speechless

yo mamdani come fix my integration tests

super relieved that wordpress doesn’t use php

I know folks get real mad when I say this but in times of widespread security crisis, static sites sure are nice

EVERYBODY LOVES MAINTENANCE

Core v3.1.7 is out now: https://github.com/11ty/buildawesome/releases/tag/v3.1.7

🚨 Erases our npm audit balance
🧱 Eliminates 21 third party dependencies (121 to 100)
🍤 -8.1% size on disk (22.3 MB to 20.5 MB)

v1.5 of this extension is out now (adds Undo/Redo, a new purgatory Saved section, shows any tabs actively playing audio with Mute controls)

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...

All of my 300+ browser tabs are beautiful

https://www.zachleat.com/web/firefox-list-all-tabs/

Don’t forget about <syntax-highlight>, the original CSS Custom Highlight API syntax highlighter web component from @andreruffert.com!

https://github.com/andreruffert/syntax-highlight-element

went to the local historic theater and watched goonies: four tickets, large popcorn, two candies, and two sodas: $18. huh??

I live every day praying that every single damn website on the world wide web will ask me to sign in with google and truly these are blessed times to be alive

firefox 157 really leaned hard into border-radius on the tabs huh

the awkward part of this post is that if these companies improve the performance of their websites it will change the meaning of the post (the filmstrips update over time)

so far I’m about 5% worried about it

I like my website

is candy corn was really corn they would have used it to make ethanol by now

another day, another “Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading ■■■ (see the browser console for more information).”

“AI, make the website good”

www.zachleat.com/web/ai-websi...

I have ascended my existence to the perfect amount of extremely online

no one should be more online or less online than me, an extremely healthy person that very closely scrutinizes the degree to which I am online (very healthily!)

https://castastrophe.blog/ is #BuiltAwesome by @castastrophe.bsky.social

<table-of-contents>

https://www.zachleat.com/web/table-of-contents/

(on a packaging/releasing spree! three new-to-you web components this week 👀)

personally I believe today’s @fontawesome.com morning slack emoji kata deserves to be more widely appreciated

I should have named it <icon-spring>

For reusable components: has anyone stress tested the seams around Light versus Shadow DOM?

Hypothetically: 20 light DOM nodes per instance versus 1 light DOM node (with 19 shadow DOM nodes) per instance. 40 vs. 1+39? and instances?

I don’t think I have a baseline intuition on the costs there.

You too can add the ambiance of hundreds of @fontawesome.com icons gently cascading down your website

https://www.zachleat.com/web/icon-fall/

(Please use responsibly)

This 352.8 kB react component with 8.1M million weekly downloads can go away when CSS `field-sizing` browser support expands.

https://npmx.dev/package/react-textarea-autosize

what paid wordpress tier do I need to maximize c-suite uptime

New web component dropped: <solar-eclipse-toggle>

https://www.zachleat.com/web/solar-eclipse/

(look, sometimes I open source code just so I can use it on all of my websites)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53kc2QjGxnY is a great video from Veronica about creating a Podcasting Platform using static websites and the magical powers of 🪄 RSS!

getting real tired of upgrading my web components every time a new major version of web components comes out

new iphone is out don’t forget to update user agents lists for those m-dot sites everyone

New post 📮 I was tired of building 474 separate pages for Open Graph Images

https://www.zachleat.com/web/open-graph-easy-build/

(my friend @lynnandtonic.com has merch for the very cool website they built and you should buy some too cottonbureau.com/people/nestf...)

come watch Angels with Filthy Souls with me on https://nestflix.fun/angels-with-filthy-souls/

I’m obsessed with a new (to me?) method to create Open Graph images that has a build cost of O(1) instead of my previous method that was O(n)

Biggest performance gain on the Built Awesome Leaderboards this week goes to Bryon Tjanaka: improved 23 Lighthouse points with a ~3s improvement in LCP!

https://www.speedlify.dev/site/btjanaka-net/

https://www.gildaconarne.de/ is #BuiltAwesome (using @webawesome.com and @fontawesome.com too!) by Stefan Frede

Two years at @fontawesome.com today! ❤️

An incredibly thoughtful, humble, and talented group of human beings and I am thankful to be a small part of it.

https://aarongustafson.github.io/table-sortable/ from @aaron-gustafson.com is a very good web component!

only 9 of 1538 sites on the site have all six green circles—pretty rare!

typescriptlang.org/ (built with Gatsby) is currently #4 (of 1538) on speedlify.dev

nice work @typescriptlang.org!

In this post @snook.ca describes a method to create exclusive RSS-only content: https://snook.ca/everything/secret-rss-posts/

“Well, Actually™ it’s a Custom Element.”

the biggest tech companies have pretty terrible websites

https://www.whimsybyjules.com/ is #BuiltAwesome by Josh Vickerson

@mattdsteele.carhenge.club.ap.brid.gy is trying out @davatron5000.bsky.social’s new MicroLighter Syntax Highlighting plugin (using CSS Custom Highlights) and shows how you can do the same on your Build Awesome/Eleventy project:

https://www.steele.blue/microlighter/

Perf win: blog.fontawesome.com had an animated GIF poster image published recently (for an Aug 4 blog post). Changing the @11ty.dev Image plugin formats from "avif,auto" to "avif,webp,auto" added an animated WebP to the <picture> stack and saved 439kB of transfer weight! (nothing else changed) 🏆️

strange.website has a field-data LCP of 345ms!? @strange.website the speed of light is supposed to be an upper limit

https://www.speedlify.dev/site/strange-website/

OH: “Tired of getting sick accidentally? With Salmonutella, you can choose when you shit your pants.”

big news everyone we got a trailer for our riding lawnmower

why does adobe.com (or would any website) use `<link rel="icon" href="data:,">`?

oracle’s web site is winning on the Big Tech Website Leaderboard https://www.speedlify.dev/group/big-tech/ but not for a good reason: the website is… uh… not working

Testing out some new OpenGraph images: https://build.awesome.me/

Frequently, confidently wrong: LLMs 🤝 Human Developers

All the ways to follow along to Build Awesome news and updates: https://build.awesome.me/how-to-follow/

Use Speedlify2 to Continuously Measure Website Performance (and run automated accessibility checks)

https://www.zachleat.com/web/speedlify2/

tried to visit dolly’s website https://dollyparton.com/ but unfortunately it uses wordpress 🥺

RIP Dolly. Our family just went to Dollywood *three weeks ago* and we got a little first-hand taste of the impact she’s had on the world.

332M books donated through her Imagination Library: https://imaginationlibrary.com/

there needs to be a Web Performance Razzie Award for corporate websites

anyway it should be interesting to see this category fill in with data today www.speedlify.dev/group/builde...

our tool helps *you* make fast websites — this very slow marketing website we built with it will explain everything

One more fun bit here: speedlify measures speedlify (and measured it before and after the move to speedlify2!)

www.speedlify.dev/site/www-spe...

This version takes great care to maintain backwards compatibility with any existing <speedlify-score> components using speedlify.dev as their upstream data source. Let me know if you see issues!

A little sneak peek at some very big updates to `speedlify` (just kidding they’re live): www.speedlify.dev

Decoupled measure step from rank so that it runs continuously & incrementally. Ranks sites on CWV field data and Axe violations.

This is the new home for the @11ty.dev Leaderboards.

Did Netlify change their default trailing slashes (Pretty URLs) configuration? I’m not seeing canonical redirects to trailing slashes (which I want) any more.

Wrote this up a few years ago (is this info is wrong now?): www.zachleat.com/web/trailing...

Proposal: should we add a new `parseDateString` universal filter?

https://github.com/11ty/buildawesome/issues/4346

Feedback welcome!