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Accessibility Solutions
Accessibility Solutions - a free resource Steve Woodson created that provides simplified solutions to common digital accessibility problems
Bright Pink
Bright Pink - Details about the website modernization and upgrades made to assessyourrisk.org for the Bright Pink Organization
Be Inclusive
Be Inclusive - a software as a service application that Steve Woodson built that provides simple digital accessibility audit tracking
Design Tokens
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BN, an Augeo company
Brand Networks - Details about the website redesign WordPress build
I'm Steve Woodson, a web developer based in Chicago
Some background on how Steve came to be a web developer, what he's been working on recently, and what he's currently focusing on as a freelance web developer.
Visual History
Accessibility Statement
Blog
Mostly technology-focused musings about architecting, developing, and managing web applications. Along with some thoughts on productivity, freelancing, and being human in a complex world.
Blog Categories
Categories for my mostly technology-focused musings about architecting, developing, and managing web applications.
Blog Tags
Tags for my mostly technology-focused musings about architecting, developing, and managing web applications.
Cheer Bear Steve
Life is too short not to find any opportunity for some cheer!
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Homepage
Steven Woodson - A CPACC certified freelance web developer with over 20 years experience bringing web applications to life. Passionate about Web Accessibility, Design Systems, and User Experience.
Mission Statement
Personal and Professional Mission Statement of Steven Woodson, shared publicly in the hopes that it helps you consider and format your own. It's worth it!
What I’m Doing Now
What Steve is focused on right now, updated periodically
Plaid Swatch Generator
SVG-based Plaid Swatch Generator, use five color inputs to generate your own unique plaid swatch
Project Inquiry
Project Inquiry form for freelance web development consulting services provided by Steven Woodson
Projects
Informational case studies of some select projects Steven Woodson had the pleasure of working on recently.
Resume / CV
Resume of Steven Woodson, a Chicagoland Web Developer with over 20 years experience bringing web applications to life. Passionate about Web Accessibility, Design Systems, and User Experience.
Let’s work together
Independent web development consultant services by a CPACC certified Web Application Developer with over 20 years of industry experience creating clear, accessible, and straightforward digital products that put users first.
Style Guide
Testimonials
Testimonials for Steven Woodson, written by the best colleagues and clients ever!
Testimonial from Ajay Khanna
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Ajay Khanna
Testimonial from Ali Moussa
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Ali Moussa
Testimonial from Amy Willis
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Amy Willis
Testimonial from Ben Hulan
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Ben Hulan
Testimonial from Catrina Ahlbach
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Catrina Ahlbach
Testimonial from Dan Deiure
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Dan Deiure
Testimonial from Ericka Seastrand O'Connor
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Ericka Seastrand O'Connor
Testimonial from Kirsten Alford-Osborne
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Kirsten Alford-Osborne
Testimonial from Michaela McKanna
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Michaela McKanna
Testimonial from Miguel Caballero
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Miguel Caballero
Testimonial from Rajwinderpal Kaur
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Rajwinderpal Kaur
Testimonial from Sadia Rodriguez
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Sadia Rodriguez
Testimonial from Sarah Scalia
A testimonial for Steve Woodson written by Sarah Scalia
Book Summaries
- Resilient Management
  A book summary of Resilient Management by Lara Hogan. Building effective leadership skills and creating a healthy, resilient workplace culture.
- Smarter Faster Better
  A book summary of Smarter Faster Better written by Charles Duhigg. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.
Blog Posts
- Fluid Font Size by Character Count
  Larger font sizes for shorter headlines, vanilla JavaScript for the character count calculations and CSS clamp for responsive sizing
- Practical Developer Tips for Digital Accessibility Advocacy
  Digital accessibility advocacy tips from a web developer’s perspective, all focusing on building accessibility support into our daily work.
- Nuxt 2 to Astro 3 Replatforming – from Setup to Production
  Notes from a replatform effort from Nuxt to Astro, including setup, struggles, migration, and finding solutions for search and sitemap.
- Why Budgets are so Important for Software Development Projects
  Using a real estate analogy, I share why budget is a critical question that should be considered carefully when starting a new software dev project.
- Web Components in Astro
  How to use native web components inside an Astro project, with a few isolated examples and explanation of some issues I had to navigate.
- Fighting Back Against Toxic Productivity
  I have a sometimes unhealthy obsession with my todo list, here I share some intentional self awareness strategies I use to periodically recalibrate
- State of the Browser 2023 Conference Recap
  A brief bulleted recap of State of the Browser 2023 from my perspective, including the decision to sponsor, and a bit about traveling to London to attend in person.
- One of a Kind Business Cards
  I wanted memorable and personal business cards to share. Here’s my process towards a unique experience that encourages further engagement.
- Going Independent – Two Months In
  The last freelance journey post, covering the past few weeks of progress including open source contributions, site updates, and a new project!
- Eleventy Style Guide Generator – Step by Step guide adding to an existing site
  Step by Step guide to adding the Eleventy Style Guide Generator to an existing site. Details on how to avoid needing WebC or Design Tokens included.
- Pulling WordPress Post Categories & Tags Into Eleventy
  Step by step guide to gathering post categories and tags from the WordPress REST API for better filtering and discoverability in an Eleventy blog.
- Eleventy Style Guide Generator with WebC Component Support
  The simplicity and speed of Eleventy with the organization of a self documenting design system. Style guide generator that incorporates design tokens, fluid typography, and WebC components.
- Going Independent – Week Four & Five Check in
  Weeks four and five freelance journey check in, touches on a contract opportunity I chose not to pursue, how I’m getting more organized, and other progress & plans.
- Going Independent – Week Three Check in
  Week three check in on my freelance web developer journey. Some more networking, my first big proposal rejection, and some coding progress for an 11ty style guide generator.
- I Want To Be Known For… – Freelance Introspection
  This is a follow up post from the “Ideal Client and Project”, continuing my introspective journey as I iterate on my various online presences that I’d roughly call my “personal brand”.
- Going Independent – Week Two Check in
  Week two check in on my journey towards going independent. Setting up more operations, networking for freelance web development projects, and took a couple days off.
- The Ideal Client and Project – Freelance Introspection
  There’s a surprising amount of introspection required when you decide to go freelance. One is to figure out “the ideal” client and project. Here’s my process so far.
- Going Independent – Week One Check in
  A week since I shared I’m going freelance, which was a week after being laid off. Keeping that weekly cadence for a bit as I continue to figure things out.
- Steve Woodson – Independent Web Development Consultant
  I’m manifesting a decade old dream and moving towards independent web development consulting. Here’s some reflection of the past week, and how I came to choose this exciting next adventure.
- I Was Laid Off, Now What?
  I was laid off, this post is where I share some of the research I had done, my reflections from the first few days, and an open invite to chat with others affected.
- Intentional Attention – My Organization Strategy for Interesting Reads
  With an ever growing list of interesting content and limited time to read it all, this is how I’ve been more intentional about how I organize and parse.
- Plaid Swatch Generator
  SVG based plaid swatch generator, choose your five colors and generate a unique plaid pattern that you can download and share.
- How I Hacked My Brain to Let Myself Relax in the Evenings
  A successful productivity experiment that has reduced my anxiety and lets me give myself permission to relax in the evenings.
- Email Newsletters – My Emotional Response Spectrum and Organization Strategy
  How I personally categorize newsletters, how that categorization has influenced how they’re organized, and how much attention they get as a result.
- CloudFront Function for basic auth, redirect, and serving from S3
  How to switch from Lambda@Edge to a single CloudFront function for serving static content from an AWS S3 bucket, with redirects and basic auth included!
- Conserving Sentry Transactions by Ignoring Laravel Routes
  Sentry limits transactions per month, this shows how to conserve them by ignoring specific Laravel PHP routes you don’t need to trace later.
- Joining the IndieWeb with Webmentions and Microformats
  A collection of resources that helped me get Webmentions set up on the blog posts for this site.
- Adding a Table of Contents to dynamic content in 11ty
  Code that introduces automated anchor links to headlines in Eleventy dynamic-loaded content. Improves accessibility and makes content sharing easier!
- Solving Animation Layout Flickering Caused by CSS Transitions
  Solving layout flickering (or animation flashing) happening on browser resize caused by CSS transitions, with live before and after examples!
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Sorting Eleventy Global Data Files by Date
  Step-by-step guide to date-based global data sorting in Eleventy, including automated by file last modified and manually via a data property
- Getting Started in Technical Leadership
  I get asked “how do I get started in technical leadership” enough that I decided to share a bit of what has helped me grow over the years.
- Thought Experiment – Greatest Superpower and Biggest Weakness
  Reflections on my strengths and weaknesses both professionally and personally, with an action plan to leverage the strengths and improve on the weaknesses.
- Pulling WordPress Content into Eleventy
  Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress part 2 – How to pull content from a WordPress RESTful API into an Eleventy generated static site.
- SSH “Server Key Changed” Error and How to Fix It
  Brief description of the common “server key has changed” error, and details on how to fix it on a Mac local server environment.
- Making Intervention Image Ignore SVGs
  Quick writeup of how I handled a pervasive Intervention Image error “Intervention\Image\Exception\NotReadableException” in a Laravel app.
- Composable Architecture Powered by WordPress
  One developers journey toward content authoring nirvana. Thought process, decisions, and source code for a WordPress composable architecture.
- IAAP CPACC Exam Preparation and Reflection
  Some notes on how I prepared for the CPACC Certification exam and reflecting on the exam itself.
- Implementing Dark Mode
  Details of how I implemented dark mode on Be Inclusive, including some issues I encountered along the way.
- Alternatives for object-fit in IE11
  A background image compromise to support IE11 while also giving modern browsers the best experience using CSS object-fit. Presented with detailed problem, solution, examples, and alternatives.
- Soft Skills: Productivity and Goal Setting
  It’s easier to set well-defined, achievable goals when you base them on long-term, general goals. A personal mission statement and thinking in terms of roles can help.
- Empathy in Web Accessibility
  On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we explore how building empathy is fundamental to improving our approach to web accessibility.
- What the Font are Vertical Rhythm and Modular Scale?
  Why you should care about vertical rhythm and modular scale, defines them, and a demonstration on how to integrate them into your next project.
- Soft Skills: Improving Your Emotional Intelligence
  The term “Soft Skills” covers a broad spectrum of topics in interpersonal, communication, leadership, and personal skills. These are arguably the most important skills for your career, but by definition, they are also difficult to measure.
- The Four Levels of Mobile Browser Testing
  Tips to help you embrace the budget and time constraints of your project while testing in mobile browsers.
- Managing Multi-Tenant Component Styles
  Tracing the path we took to accomplish a unique, cohesive design system for multiple sites within a single Content Management System (CMS) platform installation.
- Off-canvas Menu + Fixed Navbar = Buggy iOS Safari
  While working on a responsive refresh of the Upshot website I came across some buggy behavior when mixing an off-canvas menu with a fixed position element on the page. I realize that fixed elements have had a history of bugginess in iOS and detailed articles have already been written. However, I hadn’t seen what was occurring for me […]
- Avoiding Career Stagnation
  As a web developer the potential for career stagnation – feeling stuck, idle, and lacking progression – is higher than average. With technology constantly being improved and reinvented it’s amazingly easy to find yourself falling behind. I’ve felt this way several times over the years, to the point where I’ve started to also notice what […]
- Filtering and Sorting a Table with PHP
  I had a friend ask me earlier this week if I knew of any resources that could point him in the right direction on how to create a PHP page of tabular data that had the ability to be both filtered and sorted. We both weren’t able to find anything suitably simplified so the underlying […]
- PHP Functions – Part 2
  Pad, Reduce, Chunk I lumped these three functions together because I doubt I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve used any of them. Though once you understand what they do there are several applications for them that would make development cleaner if not also just plain easier. Here they are in […]
- Recharge & Release
  I find that I go through productivity phases, generally the two I am most cognizant of are what I can loosely refer to as recharge and release. When recharging I feel I read a lot more than usual. I catch up on a backlog of articles I flagged, dig into books I had been meaning […]
- No Shame In Looking It Up
  Web developers are tasked with remembering several different programming languages in order to effectively get the job done. HTML, CSS, & Javascript are the big three of course, but there are others such as Coffeescript, SCSS, XML that help workflow and facilitate tasks. Backend devs also commonly need to know scripting languages (e.g. PHP, Ruby […]
- PHP Functions – Part 1
  I’ve been working with PHP for several years, dare I say a decade at this point, and I’m still surprised at functions I’ve never or rarely used. In an attempt to share in my delight of discovering these gems and hopefully enlighten others to some very helpful functions, I’m going to try to start a […]
- Apache 2GB file limit
  Just came across a new issue I hadn’t dealt with before, apparently once a file (in my case a very large error_log file) reaches 2GB or 2,147,483,647 bytes it can’t work with the file anymore. In this case the system couldn’t write to the error log and threw an Internal Server Error. I didn’t realize what the […]
- URI vs URL? Think Scotch vs Whisky
  For the longest time, I’ve been unconsciously transposing URI and URL (with the occasional sprinkling of “web address”) in conversations and correspondences without ever really considering that they are abbreviations for two different things. That is until I decided to finally read up on these confounding abbreviations and got the proper info on the real difference between URL and URI. So you […]
- Website Performance – gZipping & Extended Expirations
  With a mixture of a few techniques added to the .htaccess or httpd.conf files, you can reduce the pageload and the bandwith usage of your website fairly easily. In the examples below i’m referring to expressions for addition to .htaccess, the http.conf file may be structured differently to do the same things. I’m setting this […]
- MySQL Optimization Top Ten List
  I recently had the opportunity to delve deeper into MySQL and how to optimize and generally better my database structure and queries. There’s a lot of information on this topic so I thought i’d share the top ten things that matter to me when creating and querying databases.
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