It only takes one README.md file to create and deploy a VuePress site. The simplicity is the beauty of the project. It’s also possible to vuepress eject and get a fully blown Vue site that compiles in components and works offline.

Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the base template from scratch, but you want the power of a utility framework like Tailwind CSS.

Generate an initial VuePress site (assuming Mac OS)

# Install globally
npm install -g vuepress # OR yarn global add vuepress# Create the project folder
mkdir vuewind && cd vuewind# Create a markdown…

The central Marketing and Communications Office is looking for an individual who is driven to create Web user experiences that bring the university brand to life and encourage action.

We are looking for someone with solid website design and UX experience. The individual will need to have enough HTML/CSS/JS experience to develop the frontend HTML through an existing build process and tooling.

Ability to blend technical expertise with a design aesthetic that embraces the university identity guidelines and explores new creative executions incorporating the university’s brand campaign. The ability to juggle multiple projects to meet project deadlines.

Ability to work…

Recently Andrew Del Prete and Full Stack Radio posted about removing unused css declarations when building Tailwinds CSS into a Laravel project.

It sounds like magic but behind the scenes it is searching through all .html, .blade.php, .js and .vue files for css classes and removing any from the compiled css that are never used on the frontend.

After working through it myself I put together a step-by-step from scratch guide.

This guide assumes you’re on a Mac and have Laravel Valet 5.5, Laravel 5.5 installer, NPM 5.5, Node 8.9, and GIT.

The project setup

# Setup valet folder and TLDvalet domain…

A university is filled with people doing incredible things. I’ve work in and around higher education professionals for 15 years. I’m constantly amazed by their ingenuity and willingness to share their lessons learned.

Ideas are just ideas without the support of others

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

Taking the time to shop an idea around before it is presented is required for success. Getting not only feedback from the primary audience but also anyone who will be living with its implementation.

There are many PHP deployment options, I’ve been exploring Deployer.org (version 4.x) over the last few weeks.

Starting with a local build zero-downtime Laravel script that ships only the final code to the server is a little slow, so let’s make it a little faster.

When deploying, seconds matter

Of all the tasks, npm:local:install was the slowest. On a fresh deploy it took almost a minute installing dependencies.

➤ Executing task npm:local:install
• done on [dev]
✔ Ok [43s 22ms]

Subsequent deploys prime the node_modules directory, but that isn’t something we can rely on.

Yarn to the rescue

Last year Facebook released Yarn, a drop-in replacement for NPM…

Last year I purged as many incoming requests for my attention as possible. Medium has become something I’ve adopted, enjoy and think it’s worth giving it a shot to stick around.

Video games or watching too many movies wasn’t the problem, to be honest I’ve never done much of either. It was the little things that stole my attention without even realizing it. The small things that I did habitually on a daily, hours or immediate basis that forced me to become deliberate about my time.

Things I’ve purged checking daily

• Instagram, Twitter, Facebook timelines
• HTML email newsletters
• Push notification for basically anything on my…

Moving beyond Envoy

Laravel Envoy (version 5.4) was a nice leap forward from Rocketeer, which ported Capistrano’s zero downtime deploy to PHP. Laravel’s response, Envoy, is a “do it yourself” minimalist tool compared to Rocketeer’s pre-built recipes that were almost plug-and-play.

Working with one or two projects, using a service like Envoyer to deploy sites isn’t a problem. But when the number of projects hits over 100, the cost becomes a burden. Using a per project deployment is the only cost effective approach.

Requirements

• Zero downtime deploy with ability to rollback
• Build on local (or CI machine) and rsync to server(s)
• …

Last year at Wayne State University we re-focused the admissions area of wayne.edu to reduce the depth of the site (from five to two levels deep) and bring more resources to the front page. As a result the landing page highlights the six most popular audiences and their navigation items.

Each audience has its own landing page, with the same navigation and unique elements which speak to that audience. We found these audience landing pages were being visited less frequently than before the redesign.

Our theory

Initially, we thought users were clicking on a link below their audience heading and getting directly…