New Year, New Newsletter Process, New Newsletter

The last email newsletter I sent, I manually curated and it took me... too much effort. It was also in 2019... So welcome to a new era of me sending emails. I'll be sending them via ConvertKit, but my curation will happen through a personal bookmarking app I built. It's now integrated with Sanity instead of Fauna, and Sanity is also where I'm authoring the content for these emails.

Currently, I'm writing in Sanity and then publishing to an 11ty site (which also has ALL my bookmarks). From there, I can grab the HTML for the newsletter and paste it directly into an email blast for ConvertKit. This is the first email, but I think this will make for a much more pleasant authoring experience and make me want to share my links with everyone.

2020 was wild, 2021 will continue to be odd... I hope to share some insights, personal projects and other fun things in this intro section to the email and then share my top links for any given week.

I hope you're well and doing amazing things with what time you have.

Thanks for being a subscriber.

-Bryan

P.S. Apropos of... everything? The first link this week is Robin Rendle talking about newsletters. It's an amazing read, visually inspiring, and also a bit validating to my new approach, since I was able to incorporate these newsletters into my personal blog (on a test branch) in about 30 minutes... Blog posts coming soon...

Links from the newsletter

Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me - Robin Rendle

Robin Rendle explores what it means to read and write newsletters and what it can be like in the future.

How to Create an Animated SVG Face With CSS - DEV Community

Learn how to create an animated SVG face using CSS animations, transforms, and an optional pinch of J... Tagged with css, webdev, showdev, tutorial.

Automatic Social Share Images | ryanfiller.com

Setting up automatic social share images with Puppeteer and Netlify Functions.

Chris Coyier's discussion of Automatic Social Share Images | CSS-Tricks

It's a pretty low-effort thing to get a big fancy link preview on social media. Toss a handful of specific <meta> tags on a URL and you get a big image-title-description thing

Oh, the Places JavaScript Will Go | CSS-Tricks

I tend to be pretty vocal about the problems client-side JavaScript cause from a performance perspective. We're shipping more JavaScript than ever to our...

Creativity In A World Of Technology: Does It Exist? — Smashing Magazine

Technology has done our world wonders: from advancements in medicine, travel, communication, and not to mention our own day-to-day lives. There’s no doubt that it has “transformed human experience” by impacting the way our society functions, as well as how we interact with one another and ourselves. But is this actually a good thing?

What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder's Block

CSS variables (also know as CSS custom properties) can hold all sorts of things. Some of these things were not obvious to me, which is why I decided to write...