Casey James Perno

JavaScript has no shortage of frameworks. React. Vue. Angular. Ember. Next. Gatsby. Remix. Svelte. Honestly, it feels like there’s a new one every day. One framework that especially caught my eye recently is Astro. Astro promises to deliver faster sites by shipping less: a properly static HTML site with less JavaScript, even if you’re still developing the site in JavaScript. Of course, I’ve heard similar claims from Gatsby and Next as well. So what sets Astro apart from other static site generators? In this post, we’ll look more closely at Astro, its benefits, its cons, and how it compares to some of its competitors.

Plugins and themes are the life-blood of WordPress. There are thousands of quality themes and plugins available in the WordPress repository for free, and even more out there on various marketplaces for extraordinarily low prices. Millions of people have made great websites using these tools and little else, and it is undoubtedly the reason for […]

I recently gave a talk on WordPress security at a Women in WordPress meetup and while preparing my slides, I realized I was disabling XML-RPC in WordPress without ever really understanding why. This was a learned behavior I picked up many years ago and never stopped to question. That ends now! In this post we’re […]

WordPress is ubiquitous, easy to use, and highly extensible through a wide array of themes and plugins. No doubt these factors are what we love most about the platform, but they also make WordPress a prime target for hackers. Don’t worry; this does not mean we should give up WordPress. There are ways we can […]

This was my first Jamstack conference, but it may not be my last. For an event that quickly had to pivot from an in-person London event to an online one, the Netlify team did a fantastic job. It felt like it was always meant to be virtual, or at the very least like they had […]

One of the first things I do when learning a new tool or application is to learn its keyboard shortcuts or unique features that might improve my workflow. We try so hard to enter a flow, digging through menus to figure out how to do something is a great way to break that flow. In […]

This blog is built as a static site generated with Gatsby, using WordPress to manage the content. Overall, I’m a big fan of both technologies but I have hit a few points of frustration. This isn’t a problem with the architecture, but rather a problem stemming from its novelty. Gatsby + WordPress is new, and […]

Sometimes we want to throw together a quick prototype or proof of concept and share it without hassle with friends or coworkers. CodePen has been an incredible tool for that. You can write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript right in the app and see your changes as you type. From there, all you need to do […]

I’ve written before about how this blog is deployed as a static site using Gatsby. Overall, it’s been a remarkable joy to work with. I get to use React for my architecture, Netlify for deployment, and WordPress to actually write the content. Each of these are well-loved by their users, and rightfully so, but this […]

When you think of a CSS media query, chances are you immediately think of min- or max-width. For most of the history of responsive design, it was enough to check the width of a screen to determine how the page should look and behave. Generally, anything more than 1024px wide was considered a desktop, anything […]

After a couple years of a website that simply said ‘Under Construction,’ I’m proud to reveal my Blogfolio! Although at the time of writing I only have a few blog posts out, I plan to heavily expand both the content and the features of this site. Ultimately, this will be the center of my professional […]

There are some things so fundamentally simple that they cannot be misunderstood, right? Everyone must surely grasp their self-evidence. Maybe there are some axioms like this, but it turns out the HTML reset button is not among them — or maybe I’m just not as smart as I like to think! For years, I thought […]

const is one of the new variable types introduced with ES6 to replace var and all of its eccentricities. The oddities of var, its problems, and why we needed to replace it are beyond the scope of this writing. Instead, I want to focus on the oddities of const. Don’t get me wrong, const is […]

Password managers are generally considered an improvement for online personal security. Your passwords being saved in one location may not seem secure, and it definitely comes with its own pitfalls, but a much greater threat to your online security comes from re-using or using simple/common passwords. Having the ability to create a different password for […]

The web is no longer in its infancy. At the end of the second quarter of 2018, there were almost 340 million domain names registered across all top-level domains (.net, .com, .org, etc), and that growth is accelerating 2.4% each year. With numerous free or inexpensive platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify becoming more powerful and […]