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If you find this interesting, read more about CSS Selectors Level 4 which will offer you even more tools for stylesheet development.

CSS3’s :nth-child and :nth-last-child selectors are powerful: not only can they replace :first-child and :last-child, but they can style more complex patterns like the first (or all but the first) three children, every fourth child, or combinations of the pattern “a*n+b”.

I’m now on my fifth – though I’m sure not my last – iteration of blog management, Jekyll. It’s a slick static site generator and from what I can tell, the most popular.

One of the benefits of a static site generation tool is that you can aggressively cache the content. For that I’ve thrown Cloudflare in front of everything and have it both caching and optimizing all of my assets.

As part of the re-launch I wanted to offer some basic site search. I looked into a few options for static search in pure Javascript, but the most convenient turned out to be Swiftype which was not much more work than clicking a switch on Cloudflare’s app page.

Five years ago I wrote a set of predictions about 2020. In some ways I think I was too unambitious for the progress of technology: browser technology has probably already reached the levels I had expected for a decade later. Some of them look like they might be off-target, like the increase in storage capacity of mobile devices. We still have another five years to see how they all pan out.

I thought I’d take another swing at a set of predictions. This time I’m looking out towards 2025.

Manufacturing

This is a fun little project I’ve been working on: a port of the Colossal Cave Adventure to the web. The monitor itself is nearly 100% CSS (with the exception of one image for the masking tape/signature and the diffuse reflection of the background).

The interpreter is all Java and compiled to JS via GWT. It can save its state to localStorage right now when you save in-game (although I’d like to automatically persist the state of the engine continuously before I release it).

And, FWIW, the Colossal Cave Adventure is a surprisingly hard game. 

UPDATE: Source is on github and you can play it here.

This is a follow-up to my week with a ChromeOS netbook post.

The Google Chromebook is an interesting product to watch. I’ve been a fan of and using them since the early Cr-48 days. In fact, two Chromebook laptops were in service in our household until just a few weeks ago when the Samsung Chromebook broke (although I hope to repair it soon).