Piccalilli
Andy Bell — Front-end developer, educator, founder of Set Studio
Educational content to level up your front-end skills
piccalil.li/blogNo hype, no AI slop, just high quality, pragmatic education
An independent front-end education publication running since 2018, founded by Andy Bell and powered by a roster of working practitioners. Piccalilli publishes deep, practical guides on CSS, accessibility, JavaScript, and design — the kind that walk you through real code and trust you to handle the details. The voice varies by contributor but the standard doesn't: expect thorough, opinionated writing that makes complex browser APIs and career decisions feel equally approachable.
Written by Andy Bell since 2018.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per week
6
Publication
English
How this blog's content is accessed through Blogs Are Back.
Full Content
RSS feed includes complete post content for reading in-app
Proxy Required
Feed is fetched through our proxy for browser compatibility
Proxy Post Links
Post pages are loaded through our proxy for compatibility
Embeddable
Posts can be displayed inline in the reader view
Recent posts from Piccalilli's RSS feed.
Personal website redesign project post: Wrapping up the planning
As promised in the last one, we'll wrap up planning today. This stuff is the more fun to do though! The tools I know it's what you want to see, so let's get into what I'm using for this project. My uses is here too. Planning and organising Obsidian for tracking what needs to be done, lists and notes tldraw; for sketching/mapping Design Affinity for vectors and photoshop-like work Penpot for UI design HTML, CSS and web components for prototyping Website system Navi for the pattern library/de...
The Index: Issue #167
Before we get into the Good Links™, allow me to share our brand new homepage with you. I'd love it if you checked it out! Chip away A really good read about an infamous design pattern and how to be more deliberate in their pattern choices. Blogs are back A great new RSS reader and discovery service that helps you to find more writing, away from the algorithms and timelines. Everything you never wanted to know about visually-hidden Extremely deep dive here with some interesting and simpler soluti...
A 2026 Piccalilli homepage redesign
Last year, we invested lots of time, working out how this publication was being perceived, via a couple of surveys and one-on-one interviews with our readers. We learned a hell of a lot, but the main thing that stuck out was that people were confused about what we're all about. Are we a blog, are we a publication? Turns out not many know, which is not ideal 😅 Well, we've aimed to address and highlight all of that in a homepage redesign that we've just launched. As you can see, we're not messin...
The Index: Issue #166
The left doesn't hate technology, we hate being exploited As a hard leftist and gadget lover, the idea that my political ideology is synonymous with hating technology is confusing. Every leftist I know has a hard-on for high speed rail or mRNA vaccines. But the “left is missing out” blog positions generative AI as the only technology that matters. Gita doesn't miss, as per! Current — a new RSS reader A novel approach to RSS that's a little calmer. We can see this being useful for people who fi...
An in-depth guide to customising lists with CSS
This first rule of styling lists is that they should be treated with the same reverence you would show any other text. If a list is inserted within a passage of text, treat it as a continuation and integral part of that text. For bulleted or unordered lists, use padding to indent each list item the equivalent distance of a line height. This will allow the bullet to sit neatly in a square of white-space. ul { padding-inline-start: 1lh; } Numbered or ordered lists which reach into double figures...
Follow Piccalilli
If you want to get genuinely better at CSS, accessibility, and front-end craft — taught by people who build real things — this is the publication.