Ari Stathopoulos

Software Architect, Accessibility & Sustainability evangelist, Human.

Thoughts on a Sustainable Web

17 May 2019

Sustainability in the web is something everyone should take more seriously. In 2015 the carbon footprint of the web eclipsed global air travel. Surprised? You shouldn’t be…
All sites run on some server ran by a company that you pay. There are vast server-farms around the world, and they require lots and lots of power. Guess where all that power comes from… You guessed it, mostly coal. The internet is a huge, coal-burning machine. And though some companies around the globe have started investing in renewable energies and are slowly turning greener, the situation is not improving.

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How to only print styles for Gutenberg Blocks used on a page

11 May 2019

The new WordPress Editor (codenamed Gutenberg) is amazing as it allows users to build rich and beautiful interfaces with minimal effort. But it comes with a lot of styles and logic bundled-in, and I happen to have strong feelings about that, most of them negative ones. why would anyone enqueue styles for a button block, or a gallery block if a page doesn’t use them? We should all strive to build a more sustainable web, so that needs to change.

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The future of Kirki - Planning v4.0

17 February 2019

This year Kirki got 5 years old and broke the 2 million downloads barrier. It was a big year with a lot of improvements in all areas of the plugin. I wrote a lot of code, replaced a big part of our old codebase and there were major refactors across the board. As a developer I grow through Kirki, I discover new techniques and strive to improve it all the time. However, while working on the Kirki plugin in 2018 one thing became evident. Things need to change. Kirki can’t move forward in its current form. It is bloated with a lot of code that the majority of theme developers will never use, or code that they use and I wish they never did (like for example using the customizer-styling module).

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Making Links Accessible Using Contrast

25 February 2018

Accessibility is one of the hardest things to accomplish on a site. One of the confusing things when trying to make a website accessible, is choosing the right color for your links.

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