process posts

For a while now I've been trying to write posts that draw people, such as solutions to specific problems or things that might be called articles. I think I've focused on these types of writings because parts of me want to be bring myself more prominently into the larger web community, help others, get some praise or critique for my work, and perhaps get offered a high paying job from some bigger web firm. I think I got a bit heady when I started getting above 50 visitors a day, peaking at 98. But that flow has dried up and I'm back down to less than 20.

I do like writing those types of posts sometimes, and I'm not going to stop, but I think I'm going to write a lot more smaller and less focused posts that are more generally about anything on my mind. I think I shall call the posts "The Happs" so I don't have to think of a title and to emphasize their lack of a specific topic. The article type posts really take a long time and some research to compose, and I don't have a lot of free time for them. It is often so long between when I do whatever is the impetus for them and when I write them that I've forgotten a lot of the details. I think "The Happs" will get me writing more often and allow me to put out snippets of what might later go into more thorough articles.

So, what has been happening with me lately?

The rem CSS unit allows you to base your font sizes off of the user's configured font size, but not be affected by parent elements like ems are. Older browsers don't support rems though, so it's good to provide a fallback in px for them by defining the property with a px value, then a rem value. Old browsers take the px value, then see they don't know how to handle the rem value and ignore it. New browsers take the px value, then override it with the rem value.

There are a number of SCSS mixins out there for making rem fallbacks automatically by passing in a property and some values and having it automatically output both versions of the property. I started with the css-tricks one. None of the ones I found, though, worked exactly as I wanted. I wanted to be able to work with any property values. I wanted:

• unitless number values (other than 0) to be treated as px values
• px or rem values to be converted to the other unit
• values with other units or non-numbers to be output as is (auto, none, url, etc)