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Ever wonder what's running under the hood here at CSS-Tricks? Well, it's been a while since we last shared the WordPress plugins used here on the site, and

Black people on American shores have always been seen as innately criminal. This assumption of criminality traces back beyond before the very birth of this country. Even after Americans won their independence in the Revolutionary War, blacks who tried to escape from or fight their way out of enslavement were seen as thieves, stealing their own bodies from someone else.

It started out as a routine missing persons case. But by the time the internet was done with her, Elisa Lam had become a macabre celebrity, a conspiracy magnet—and the inspiration for a TV series.

People like to talk about how Dilla had the best "ear" in hip hop, and they're totally right. Listen to full beat again and listen to just the bass part: it's a legitimate, brand-new bassline that wasn't in the original song. Listen to that transition between guit_lo and string_bass_1: there's a syncopated bass note right at the end of guit_lo and then bam, it segues right into that higher note (maybe a fifth interval? I suck at music theory). And you can't get that just by chopping things up randomly, even if you select good samples.

Pandora dominates this dismal, depressing, unpromising market completely, and it will continue to do so until Congress fixes the pre-1972 sound recordings issue. The next time you have a fleeting thought about how internet radio sucks, and could be better—well, now you know what’s to blame. It’s copyright. (You can always blame copyright).

Perhaps it was just as well, then, that the exhibition did not include a Sallman painting familiarly known as "Sputnik Christ." Painted in the late 1950's, it shows a monumental Jesus standing atop Earth, his figure extending into outer space, with planets, meteors and satellites whizzing by.

If police can’t do their jobs without violating the constitutional rights of black people, then we must question the institution of policing rather than the protesters who expose its transgressions. … In the end, the “Ferguson Effect” lacks factual basis. It took months of nationwide unrest, a litany of shocking videos and detailed reports of police violence to convince the nation that policing in America needed to be fundamentally changed. The fact that a theory lacking evidentiary support could be so hastily endorsed by some of the nation’s foremost institutions speaks to the enduring power of the belief that aggressive policing is the only way to keep black communities safe. This notion, applied exclusively to black communities, is exactly what needs to change.

Critic Noah Berlatsky examines what Quentin Tarantino's use and imagining of Johnny Cash's music means.

This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. … Why do we code?

Talk given on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are a few guiding principles we should follow in any attempt at regulating the Internet.

Talk given on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?" I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive. Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS. Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION (Vision 1 is the right one.)

A talk at dConstruct 2013. I'm here by way of atonement, because I used to be a real jerk about fandom, and I used to make fun of them, and think they were wasting their time. And then I had this kinda life-changing come-to-Jesus moment that I want to talk to you about and this really weird artifact that got produced partly because of me, and it's completely changed my thinking. And as I've gotten to know fandom and really like them, I've come to believe that they kind of represent a future and a model for what communities are like on the Internet when you have actual people using machines to talk to one another rather than this kind of invented sense of what social life and social networks are supposed to be like, the way we've engineered them.

On the hand holding the ‘Add to Slack’ button in a piece of marketing design being a brown hand. Why was the choice an important one, and why did it matter to the people of color who saw it? The simple answer is that they rarely see something like that. These people saw the image and immediately noticed how unusual it was. They were appreciative of being represented in a world where American media has the bad habit of portraying white people as the default, and everyone else as deviations from the norm.

There are many possibilities for modal overlays to appear. Here are some modern ways of showing them using CSS transitions and animations.

Awesome handling of keyboard events. jwerty is a JS lib which allows you to bind, fire and assert key combination strings against elements and events. It normalises the poor std api into something easy to use and clear.

Peity (sounds like deity) is a simple jQuery plugin that converts an element's content into a simple mini pie, donut, line, or bar chart.

As the content industry consolidates in weird and unsettling ways over the next few months, understand the stakes: venture-funded publications, aware of how quickly their borrowed social audiences appeared and therefore understanding how quickly they could go somewhere else, will rightly crave security in the form of an exit. The best might go public, and find new ways to justify their independent existence, creating something like full-service content agencies, producing news and entertainment and ads as their ever-shifting context permits. Others will simply attempt to pitch their value to Facebook (or whatever) as something valuable to companies other than Facebook (or whatever). Those purely dependent publications that fail–maybe those middling, boldly cynical latecomer social mills about nothing??—will take stock of their remaining parts, and realize that they assemble into nothing. They will only be able to lurch forward until the money runs out.

Full access to the software and services your business runs on is crucial; be sure you know all current license and login details.

I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across, whilst also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role of perpetuating structural racism, lest they character assassinate me. So I’m no longer talking to white people about race. I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation. The balance is too far swung in their favour. Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo. I’m not talking to white people about race unless I absolutely have to. If there’s something like a media or conference appearance that means that someone might hear what I’m saying and feel less alone, then I’ll participate. But I’m n

In this edition of his monthly column, the premier writer on new, emergent, underground music addresses how the framing of music can radically redefine it. I love vaporwave and ‘internet music’, I really do. At its best it’s a provocative, complex and highly modern statement—but can you imagine it getting stupider, then more commonplace, then sticking around for more or less a decade? And towards the end of the decade, a well-meaning ebook gets published called Internet Music: The Weird and Wonderful World of Online Sounds, its title all spelled out in unicode characters and a naked 3D virtual woman floating above a blue watery backdrop on the cover? Wouldn’t you want a more exciting decade?

Great interview. Porpentine is an award-winning artist who has recently released a collection of her hypertext work from 2012-2015 called Eczema Angel Orifice. There are 25 stories collated in total. To create them, Porpentine drew from her own traumatic experiences and emotions, spinning them into engrossing, oneiric fictions.

Every time we write about an encounter that portrays the police in a negative light — the death of Bland, or the McKinney pool party, or police in Austin pepper spraying and snatching property out of citizen hands for no visible reason — we receive comments from readers who want to know why we don’t spend more time writing about the good things that the police do, or why we aren’t writing about when police are killed in the line of duty. The reason for that is simple: Because when an officer like Brian T. Encinia, or Eric Casebolt, or any other person we entrust with a badge and a gun abuses his authority, he’s doing so in our name, on our dime. When a police encounter ends with Sandra Bland dead or teenagers abused, we all bear some culpability for it, because we paid them to do it. And as long as we talk about bad-apple police, or how refusing to comply with police orders with a smile on your faces means that you bear some responsibility for whatever the police do to you afterward, we’re endorsing that system. The death of a police officer at the hands of a criminal is a tragedy, but it’s one that has a clear and simple villain: The person who pulled the trigger. The death of Sandra Bland is a tragedy, too, but the villain there is one it’s a lot less comfortable to identify: It’s all of us who empower a police culture that, as it’s been proven again and again in recent years, does not work for all of the citizens it was created to serve and protect.

Too often, work cultures neglect the fact that workers have bodies, forgetting that food, exercise, and rest are design requirements.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

But words do not adhere to their creators’ intentions, and the word “meritocracy” has certainly not clung strictly to Young’s definition. In usage it has morphed from a flawed sociological experiment to a disingenuous defense: having failed to introduce the necessary changes to produce an actual meritocracy, the wealthy elite simply appropriated its trappings. The new meritocrat is simply the old aristocrat with a righteous smirk on his face.

A podcasts site focusing on black podcasts and podcasts of color.

Don’t you hate when editors use “I don’t know enough writers of color” as an excuse to back up the homogeneity of their publications? We do too. Here’s a fix, brought to you by Durga Chew-Bose, Jazmine Hughes, Vijith Assar, and Buster Bylander. Need someone to cover politics? Here you go. A correspondent in Chicago? We’ve got you covered. We aim to create more visibility for writers of color, ease their access to publications, and build a platform that is both easy for editors to use and accurately represents the writers. The response so far has been overwhelming (thank you!) and we welcome further feedback from both camps, but please realize that this site is run by volunteers and is a work in progress. We still need help fixing mistakes and keeping things running smoothly.

To understand race in the U.S. today, it's Kalief Browder's story, not Rachel Dolezal's, that really matters. … At our implicit behest, a boy was snatched off the streets of New York. His parents were told to pay a certain sum, or he would not be released. When they did not pay, he was beaten and then banished to lonely cell. Browder’s captors then offered him a different way out—pay for your freedom in the political currency of a guilty plea. He refused. More beatings. More solitary. The sum was lowered. Browder still refused. He was subjected to the same routine. Browder defeated his captors. They tired, released him, and likely turned to perpetrate the same scheme on some other hapless soul. … If Americans are not responsible for what happened to Kalief Browder, for the ransoming of children, then we are not responsible for ensuring that it never happens again.

Regarding the ‘Why Are You So Angry?’ series of videos about angry gamers on the internet. My feeling was that I, as a privileged person, can get away with kicking a hornets’ nest. The angle I’d never considered, likely because I and the people who helped me make the video have never been on the receiving end of this kind of backlash, is splash damage. That when you engage with Jack, there are often bystanders. That privilege may protect me, but it doesn’t protect everyone in the blast radius. That if I engage with Jack about Anita, he might just go attack Anita in retaliation. The thing about hornets is they don’t only sting the person who kicks the hive.

“I’m trying to put on those Phil Collins melodies,” West told Miss Info, naming the most elusive and least-explored influence on 808s. He was talking about Collins’ synth-like, proto-Auto-Tuned voice, but there’s also a sonic kinship between the hard, sharp, and dry drums that Collins popularized on his earliest solo records and the uncanny explosions in dead space that make up 808s’ beats. Collins first came upon this “gated reverb” drum sound while working on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 track “Intruder”, when the song’s engineer, Hugh Padgham, used a microphone normally used for in-studio communication—something closer to an intercom—and then trapped and snuffed out any overtones with a signal processor called a noise gate. It made the drum hits both vivid and lifeless, loud sounds that confused our sense of how loud sounds travel. The technique was famously employed on Collins’ signature hit “In the Air Tonight”, which Kanye has covered live.