Thoughts on writing

Last summer (2024) I decided that I wanted to write more often. I started to publish tips weekly.

The idea was to write tiny posts (like Manuel Matuzovic does https://www.matuzo.at/til), making it easy to write once a week and publish it. My first post, Pill buttons was the thing that sparked the whole idea. Having written CSS for 15+ years I've encountered a lot, and sharing useful solutions to common (like creating a pill shape) and not so common problem seemed like something I could do week in and week out.

The problem was that even the smallest problems in web development often needs thorough explanations, like this post about SVG icons.

Each tip, which was supposed to just be tiny posts, quickly became long-written articles with a lot of code examples and explanations. It was really time-consuming, taking way longer than I wanted to. Still, I managed to do it roughly each week for about 6 months, racking up 21 tips. I'm happy with that.

Changes to my post structure

In January this year (2025), Kevin Powell released his website HTML & CSS Tip of the Week, and God dammit it's good! It's everything I wanted this collection of posts to be.

I still want to share tips, but I'm stepping away from the weekly format (actually I already have, having not published weekly since January), and removing "Tip of the week #" from each article title. All my posts, either them being tips, thoughts, reflections, opinions, encouragements or whatnot, doesn't need to be labelled as such. I do tag my posts (like this), creating different collections, but each weekly tip is standalone enough not to be labelled as a tip, but rather just like any other post.

I've also done some changes to the URLs of my posts, removing the tag. The aforementioned post about Pill buttons is changed from:

• /writing/tips/pill-buttons

to:

• /writing/pill-buttons

The URL /writing/tips still exists, but the posts are standalone, giving me the opportunity to change the tag or add several tags to one post.

Going forward

I'm not going to vow to write more in the future, but the removal of "tip of the week" makes it easier to write just for writings sake. The last couple of months have been really busy at work as well, so I've felt a bit of fatigue.

But I'm still going to try!

Former "Tip of the week" posts

For those curious, these were the original "Tip of the week" posts:

• Tip of the week #001: Pill buttons
• Tip of the week #002: Self-aware components in container queries
• Tip of the week #003: Icons with inline SVG
• Tip of the week #004: Replace media queries with container queries
• Tip of the week #005: Responsive Youtube videos using aspect ratio
• Tip of the week #006: A good way to structure your SCSS files
• Tip of the week #007: Become better at CSS using Codepen
• Tip of the week #008: Use REM for everything, not only font size
• Tip of the week #009: Color variable names in CSS
• Tip of the week #010: Embrace simplicity
• Tip of the week #011: Nesting in SCSS
• Tip of the week #012: How to style CMS-generated rich text
• Tip of the week #013: Use logical properties
• Tip of the week #014: Why sticky headers can be bad
• Tip of the week #015: The :where selector
• Tip of the week #016: Go-to class names
• Tip of the week #017: Stop using the terms "mobile" and "tablet"
• Tip of the week #018: Create modals with the <dialog> element
• Tip of the week #019: Think of CSS selectors as queries
• Tip of the week #020: Simple progressive enhancements in CSS
• Tip of the week #021: Use the description list element