SitePoint Weekly – 6 August, 2020

🍓 The freshest resources, stories, and exclusive content for web developers, designers, and digital creators.

Pointed Advice

🦾 A selection of our latest articles and tutorials

TikTok's Death Row Clock

🍕 Web development and technology links from around the web

• While we wait to see what happens between ByteDance, Microsoft, and Trump, TikTok is apparently trying to shore up its future in Europe by announcing a regional data center for European user data, and Facebook is going after the market with Instagram Reels.
• At the macro level, the best analysis on whether or not a ban or forced sale is something that should happen comes from Ben Thompson of Stratechery fame (as is often the case).
• Facebook, Twitter penalize Trump for posts containing coronavirus misinformation — the Trump campaign account, notably, not the more infamous one.
• Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel.

♾️

• In Very Jamstacky Things, Phil Hawksworth figured out how to use Trello as a CMS for Eleventy in this CSS-Tricks article.
• For the aspiring among you: Maria went from marketing to a software engineer job.
• A list of command-line tools rewritten in Rust that aim to provide modern, often much faster, alternatives to the existing shell commands.
• Brian Rinaldi shares a complete guide to Netlify Forms (his Jamstacked newsletter with Cooperpress is also a must-read).
• A Single Div is an incredibly impressive CSS drawing project by Lynn Fisher, where each piece of CSS art has been built on — you guessed it — a single div.
• Tiny Helpers is a collection of free, single-purpose web tools for developers, ranging from QR code generators to accessible color palette tools.
• Speedlify is a tool to help you benchmark the web performance and accessibility of sites over time, when you're not quite ready for a full-blown solution like Calibre.
• Terminalizer records your terminal, and generates an animated gif or shares a web player link.
• Learn how to make a simple, serverless geolocation service.

♾️

We've looked at some beautiful Linux desktop customizations in recent weeks, but in this issue we'll turn our attention towards Rainmeter on Windows 10.

While minimalism and pastels aren't trending as hard on the dark side, there are some impressive setups to be seen – and open source software is still making it happen, like a Jedi on the Death Star.

Above is Gruvy, a popular Rainmeter skin that was just updated this week.

The snappily named Clean Black & White Rainmeter Setup combines the aforementioned tool, RocketDock, and a Japanese line art wallpaper to pretty neat effect.

Robik throws a dash of lifestyle blog design against the minimalist wall. The background reminds me of my iPadOS setup — but perhaps that's a topic for next week!

Have you been tweaking desktop customizations on Linux, Windows, or macOS recently? Feel free to hit reply and show me what you've been working on!

The Roadmap

Founder spotlights, advice for makers from the web, and a place to share your early-stage projects with the rest of the community. Get in touch with us and tell us a bit about your project.

Now that's a tailwind! Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan has just published some impressive details and insights on his team's adventure towards 10 million total installs, and just under $2 million in revenue from Tailwind UI — a UI kit that has been out for just 5 months.

Naturally, this is quite a lot of revenue in a short time for a UI kit, underpinned by the success of an open source project that people love using.

Wathan details the side projects that served as Tailwind's genesis, the value of an open source foundation, and the path to going full-time. It's an impressive story, and a particularly insightful one if you're looking to create products that your fellow developers and designers will love and share.

➤ Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business

(h/t to Stuart Mitchell, our Head of Engineering, who artfully provides links that editors love and share)

While there's no shortage of links to be found on the internet, much as with grandma's apple pie, we prefer the taste of yours because they come from the heart. Here are three ways you can send them our way:

1. Hit reply on this email and shoot one over the old-fashioned way.
2. Literally land in my DMs. No sliding, thanks!
3. This form, expertly designed to allow you to dispense with all social anxieties around the crafting of business-casual pleasantries.

Connect with the Community

We'll see you in the next edition — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities or on social media:

• SitePoint forums
• Our Discord server
• On the blog
• Or on Twitter

🛳️ If you'd like to share the newslettery love with your friends, we've created a shareable signup page just for them in response to overwhelming demand. Thank you for your eternal support, mum! But please stop emailing me at work. Once was fine.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of the SitePoint community!

👋