Blag

Sara Vieira's recent post on webdesignerdepot titled "10 CSS selectors you shouldn't code without" is well-intended but starts off on the wrong foot.

The problem lies with selector number one on the list: the universal selector (*).

I keep seeing people write CSS and jQuery selectors to act on elements with [data-*] attributes where the initial selector is a class. More often than not the class adds more bloat to the code and ends up becoming a secondary point of failure.

Why bother writing $('.foo').data('bar'); when the data should really be accessed using $('[data-bar]').data('bar')?

This changes the HTML markup from:

<div class="foo" data-bar="lorem ipsum dolor sit amet">...</div>

to:

<div data-bar="lorem ipsum dolor sit amet">...</div>

How nice is that? No class! One less thing to forget.

Recently I've been needing to do some video conferencing at work. "Google Hangouts" has been the video conferencing app of choice. For the uninitiated it can be difficult to figure out how to start a hangout for a group of people on video chat.

It's quite simple really. Just go to https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_ and you'll be redirected to a new google hangout. The ID will be appended to the end of the URL which will look something along the lines of https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123.

You can then copy and paste the generated URL to share it with anyone who should join the call.

I was about to update my website with completely unrelated information about front-end data management, when a typo took me to my own 404 page. I hadn't been there in a while, and I realized that I hadn't taken care of the minor issue of getting the image centered.