Mint Digital

One of my favorite aspects of Mint Digital's work is starting new projects on a regular basis. This lets the team learn from past mistakes, and incorporate the latest design and tech ideas that we've been itching to try out. When we find something that works well, we're able to update other projects with the best new ideas.

We certainly don't kick off each Rails app from scratch. The starting point is BloomBox, our toolbox for building fast, scalable websites. As the project progresses, we learn hard lessons about zero-downtime deployments, front- and back-end optimization, and our development and testing practices.

A few critical pieces of BloomBox tech have made our recent websites noticeably faster and more reliable. These features would also improve our older projects nicely, so we extracted them to gems. These gems solve some common problems, so to contribute back to the developer community, we've released them as open source.

When making a web page load faster, one of the most commonly cited front-end techniques is minimizing the number of HTTP requests. In fact, it's Yahoo!'s number one rule. Each HTTP request is slow; making many requests is very slow.

We're at it again. We've stripped off our renowned Mint Digital robes, and we're showing off the goods.

Replace "robes" with "CSS", and "the goods" with "some good HTML". But enough jargon. What happened to Mint's website? Where did that beautiful design go? You're not really naked, are you?

“Prove it,” you mutter cautiously. Actually, for an entire day, the proof is right on our website — today, we're celebrating the annual CSS Naked Day!

We’re obsessed with making great things, even the parts you don’t think about. We use modern techniques and web standards to build our sites, and that makes them more robust on new and old web browsers alike. On CSS Naked Day, you can see the results: our website stays usable and content rich even when you strip away the styling. This is especially thoughtful for users with slow internet connections (the content loads right away, and the styling shows up later) and for visually impaired users who depend on audio screen readers, not shapes and colors.

Hundreds of forward-thinking web developers are joining in, and demonstrating that websites should work well at their most basic level—content. Among the Mints, Phil Nash’s blog and my personal site are also stripping down to promote web standards. Here’s to another year of pushing the web forward!