Links For You (7/18/26)
Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see.
Building a Blog with Astro
It's been a hot minute since I've written about Astro. I first started using it since Webflow was a sponsor and found that I really dug it, but over the past couple of months I've not had the bandwidth to keep playing with it. That being said, I keep my eyes open for cool posts and this by Zell is awesome: Building a Real Blog Easily in Astro. I'm pretty sure my first blog post on Astro showed a basic blog, but this article goes really deep.
Interactive SVGs and PDFs
As they say, you can take the dev out of PDFs but not the PDFs out of the dev. I'm now two... three? years post Adobe and Foxit and I still perk up when I see a blog post about PDFs. For today, I'm sharing a post that discusses interactivity with SVGs and PDFs. The SVG part is pretty much what you expect - DOM stuff and JavaScript. The PDF part is a bit more esoteric as it references a JavaScript engine built into PDFs from like the Mesozoic era of computers.
Animating a Dialog
The Dialog element still feels relatively new, but has great support (even in Safari) so there's no reason not to use it. The View Transition API also has stellar support. So this article by pqina is a great example of combining the two. I've used Dialog once or twice and want to use it more. The View Transition API still hasn't quite "clicked" with me yet but I'd like to use it more (where appropriate).
Just For Fun
I've shared Post Modern Jukebox a few times here so why not once again. Here's their version of "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave. Enjoy!