Tag: CSS shapes

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 12

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 12

Storybook on Windows (FAIL)
So, after some good work on React Components in Storybook on my Mac over the weekend, it was back to the office on Monday – and my Windows computer.

Last week, I’d had trouble setting up Storybook on the Windows computer – it kept giving me a sh: start-storybook: command not found error. I found two GitHub issues that were similar to my problem:

  1. ERR! on npm run storybook
  2. sh: start-storybook: command not found

and quickly read through the discussions there to see if I could fix my installation. It didn’t work.

Then, I tried a completely fresh installation of both create-react-app (successful) and getstorybook (less so) to see if that wouldn’t solve the problem and get me up and running on Windows. It didn’t. I got the same errors as before, so that seems to indicate that there may be some compatibility issues with Windows – or maybe I just screwed up something in my system setup from the start.

Well, rather than give this issue any more time (I’d already spent 1-2 hours on it), I decided to move back over to my Codepen version of the site and continue working on some CSS styling.

Continue styling <Tag> Components
As the Featured Image for this Post shows, I decided to continue working on the Tag (and other) CSS since Windows was being picky about my React Storybook configuration.

As far as the Tags go, currently they are CSS shapes, although I feel like there may be some limitations in how I want to handle interactivity with them as CSS shapes. For example: the Tags are currently styled like so:

  1. A <div> box that contains the main text
  2. A div:before that creates the triangular portion of the tag
  3. A div:after that creates the rear Pac-man portion of the tag

So, technically, the Tag is 3 individual pieces as a CSS shape, so doing something like “flipping” it over to read the back (as I’ve done with a sample Lynda.com flip cards menu here) doesn’t seem like it will be very easy. So, I’ve considered two other options:

  1. Create an SVG shape for the Tag (a single item)
  2. Change how I show interactivity – like having some sort of “Christmas-y magic sparkle animation” flow over the To: text before displaying the From: text (and vice versa)

In addition to styling the Tags with CSS, I also added a "disabled" class to all the “gift boxes” in the footer whose dates have not yet come. Ideally, these will be linked up to the big (tagged) gifts and will be controlled by JavaScript (jQuery or React – whichever I work out) to change the date as the countdown clock changes. (i.e. when the clock reads 00:00:01 second remaining for a day, then flips over to the next day, ideally, the "active" Gift would also change.)

Also, the "disabled" tag should prevent users from being able to click on any of those Gifts to view their days “in advance” (and scrolling to dates later than the present date should also be disallowed).

Begin Responsive Styles
Finally, I decided to work on Responsive styling a little bit since the computer I did most of this coding work on in the afternoon had a screen resolution of 1024x768px (and at that size the whole Codepen looked pretty ugly). The following are some of the considerations I need to make when making this site responsive:

  1. Gifts in the footer
    1. Reduce the font size (DONE)
    2. or make the footer scrollable,
    3. or only display only the a few gifts (like some WordPress paging menus with [Prev] ... [12] [13] [14] ... [Next] buttons)
  2. Big gifts
    1. Reduce the size on smaller screens
    2. or scale them smaller
    3. and/or remove/reposition the Tag
  3. Countdown clock
    1. Reduce the size
    2. or stack it vertically to the left or right of the gift
    3. or divide it in two and stack half vertically to the left, half to the right
    4. or remove much of the styling (including the background circles) and turn it into a kind of smaller “digital clock” (as opposed to analog)
  4. Header and top menu
    1. Reduce font size and height (DONE)
    2. Also use a “hamburger” style menu button at very small sizes
  5. React-loading Blog Posts
    1. Still need to figure out how I want these styled initially anyway (title only, title and excerpt, or what) – after that we can figure out responsive styling

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 12, 2016
    • Storybook on Windows (FAIL)
    • Continue styling <Tag> Components
    • Begin responsive styles
  • December 11, 2016
    • Begin separating out CSS per Component
    • Attempt to load in static files & Sass
    • Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts
  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 11

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 11

Begin separating out CSS per Component
The way this create-react-app with Webpack configuration works is that in each ReactJS Component, I need to import the other Components and files that each depends on. For example: import React from 'react' is the first command at the top of every Component in order to load in the ReactJS library to build my Components. The same is true for CSS files.

So, rather than calling import './App.css' in every single file and controlling them all with a single stylesheet, I started breaking the main stylesheet down into separate files that handle each Component individually. In other words, my folder structure went from this:

/js
 |- GiftIcon.js
 |- Gift.js
 |- Tag.js
 |- BlogPost.js
 |- Scene.js
App.css

To this:

/js
 |- GiftIcon.js
 |- Gift.js
 |- Tag.js
 |- BlogPost.js
 |- Scene.js
/css
 |- GiftIcon.css
 |- Gift.css
 |- Tag.css
 |- BlogPost.css
 |- Scene.css
App.css

In some ways, this will now work in a similar manner that my previous Sass configuration was setup to work as. Basically, I wanted to use Sass to subdivide out all the various Component’s CSS into separate files (for easier file management) and then let the Grunt compile them all back together into my main style.css file that would be used by the site.

The only caveat is that I can no longer use Sass variables and mixins (as it stands now). This may or may not prove to be a “deal breaker.” I honestly love the way Sass makes it easy to manage variables (like brand colors or font-stacks) and mixins (like specific component styles – say, buttons, form elements, or boxes of content).

Attempt to load in static files & Sass
There may yet be a way to get Sass back into my project – and I’ll continue investigating this as time goes on. For now, I attempted two solutions to load in static files (like Google Font links) and add Sass back in. Both seem to have not worked as intended, but I may have missed something in the configuration:

  1. Custom Webpack config
    1. This is supposed to help get Sass back into the project. The webpage states: Once you create this webpack.config.js file, Storybook won’t load the default Webpack config other than loading JS files with the Babel loader.
  2. Add Custom Head tags
    1. The instructions here are to create a head.html file that resides inside the Storybook config directory and should inject these tags to the iframe where your components are rendered.
    2. Google Fonts: However, I couldn’t get Google Font links to work immediately, so I’ll need to do some more investigation about that. For now, I’ve just added those with an @import command at the top of my stylesheets.
    3. Font Awesome: I’ve also stored the Font Awesome files and CSS in project directory and used another @import command to load in Font Awesome.
Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts  

While working through the Learn React.js: The Basics videos, there were some that demostrated how to create interactive Components (the project in that Course was to create a Bulletin Board filled with Post-it Notes). So, in a similar vein, I decided to add Gift Tags to the Gifts that would allow users to address them and either Save the names entered onto the Tags, or possibly “Send” them via email or social network. Here’s the plan so far:

  1. Each Gift Component has either a) no tag with the option to add one, or b) an unaddressed, empty tag
  2. The Tag Component can be addressed with a To: and From: address
  3. On :hover, the Tag will flip over to reveal From: (it will show To: on the front by default)
  4. To: will provide space for a name, and an optional email address (or possibly social network URL)
  5. From: will default to “Santa Clause” or “Saint Nick” or “St. Nicholas” (assigned at random), but can be modified and saved
  6. Each Tag will (maybe) contain social network buttons (Facebook, Twitter, and Email primarily) to which users can send that particular (Gift – i.e. Blog Post)

I haven’t yet worked out HOW the sending of Blog Posts should be handled with the Tag Component, but so far, this is the roadmap and “ideal” plan.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 11, 2016
    • Begin separating out CSS per Component
    • Attempt to load in static files & Sass
    • Begin coding a Tag for the Gifts
  • December 10, 2016
    • Finish Lynda.com videos
    • Get all React Components working in Storybook
    • Begin creating a Christmas Scene
  • December 9, 2016
    • Learn and use Create-React-App
    • Learn and use Storybook for developing React Components in isolation
    • Update npm and node and figure out my git process between Windows and Mac
  • December 8, 2016
    • Use React and Babel via CDN to get it working “locally”
    • Install React developer Tools for Chrome
    • Create very basic React.js pages to learn it
  • December 7, 2016
    • Pull post data with the WP REST API in WordPress core!!
    • Write structural code for the React Component to be rendered
    • Install and setup BabelJS to compile the React code
  • December 6, 2016
    • Add README.md
    • Add a GitHub Issue to hold usable images
    • Add LICENSE
  • December 5, 2016
    • Create a GitHub repository and full site files for easier management
    • Setup Grunt.js to compile my Sass into CSS
    • Begin blogging about the process
  • December 4, 2016
    • Countdown clock (JS Date class & jQuery Easing) with SVGs
    • Dynamic text output for Year based on the current date
    • CSS only slider (off by 5px each slide)
  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu

Coding an Advent Calendar: Day 3

This year, I decided to create an Advent Calendar website in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. My hopes for the site are to showcase some of my frontend development abilities as well as make something fun, functional, and reusable.

Day 3

CSS bow & ribbon
I wanted to make a bow for the present entirely out of CSS, so I went back to CSS-Tricks.com’s “The Shapes of CSS” example page and found an infinity loop. I created an extra <div> for it and played around with the code a bit to get the shape right (flatter, less round, slightly more angled like it was sitting on top of the box), then changed the border colors to create a multi-colored look.

For the ribbon underneath the bow (I decided a bow alone looked a little weird), I used some similar transform: rotate() techniques from the bow and also applied different border colors to the shape to give it a similar multi-colored look like the bow.

Footer
From the beginning of this project, I knew I wanted to create some kind of horizontal, side-scrolling effect: either to display the presents in a type of slideshow, or to scroll the background as a white winter wonderland scene. I decided to add FontAwesome gift icons denoting each day leading up to Christmas in the footer that people could click on to open the present for that day.

A couple ideas for continued development:

  • Make the presents either disabled or inactive (non-clickable – error message pops up) if that day has not yet begun
  • Add small graphic hills, trees, or reindeer in the background, just above the footer (here’s some inspiration from SitePoint’s previous Christmas site)
:hover, :active, "christmas" CSS styles  
I also added some special CSS classes to help denote the current day (active), the hovered day (hover), and Christmas Day ("christmas").

References

Here are some more good resources for finding help with CSS Shapes:

  1. CSS-Tricks.com: The Shapes of CSS
  2. EnjoyCSS.com Shapes Gallery
  3. CSSPortal: Shapes
  4. CSS clip-path Maker
  5. Creating Non-Rectangular Layouts With CSS Shapes
  6. Getting Started with CSS Shapes: Wrapping content around custom paths

The last two are (extensive) blog articles that dive deep into creating non-rectangular layouts on webpages using CSS shapes.

Work Completed (to date)

  • December 3, 2016
    • CSS bow & ribbon
    • Footer with FontAwesome presents
    • Hover, active, and “Christmas Day” styles for footer presents
  • December 2, 2016
    • React.js + Axios.js initial code structure
    • Color palette
    • CSS → Sass
  • December 1, 2016
    • Let it snow
    • Typography choices
    • CSS presents (first design)
    • Design notes menu