When last I opined, dear reader, I was working to develop my own css files that met all the standards for elegant CSS: purely “semantic” (separating content from appearance) and free from classes, yet fulfilling all the basic UI needs. Then I found Pico CSS — a CSS file I…

A fundamental goal of web design is to separate content (the “what”) from the design (the “how”). From a user perspective, we want a consistent experience across different devices. …

I’ve become a fan of Jason Knight’s rants against frameworks. Frameworks become prisons that pretend to save you time, but wind up taking more time and coding to overcome their limitations while making refactoring far more difficult. I’ve written some previous examples on how to write a PWA without frameworks…

In case you are just tuning in, this is my adventure in attempting to recreate Wordpress without PHP by using JavaScript and Deno, a server app designed to replace Node.js. The code for DenoPress is in a public github repository jcoonrod/denopress. The Medium article for Part 1 described how to…

As my dozen or so readers know, I really hate using more third-party files than is absolutely necessary. That has attracted me to Deno, the cool new replacement for Node.js as it really eliminates the need for package managers. I’m using it to try and clone WordPress in JavaScript in…

In Part 1, I introduced the idea of serving an existing WordPress site using JavaScript in a Deno-based server, a relatively new replacement for Node.js by its original author. My repository for this experiment is free and opensource at this link. In Part 1, we were able to successfully recreate…

As any of my handful of followers knows, when it comes to coding, I’m a nut for simplicity. I’m a fan of PHP, and I use a lot of WordPress. With the advent of Gutenberg, using WordPress got easier — but customizing it got harder. Suddenly, you needed both PHP…

Purpose of Part 3 Understand the basics of relational databases and be able to integrate them into web-based applications using PHP. Learn about PHP extensions and how to use other people’s code in your web app. Prerequisites Part 1 of this series — the basics of PHP Part 2 of this series — PHP inter-page…

Purpose of this part: To be able to communicate between pages. For example, on one page you enter data, submit it and then display it on another page. Click here to get back to Part 1 Prerequisites Basic understanding of HTML5 forms and inputs, Note — in the old days, in order to validate inputs…