#Dropdown

[jcmarchi]

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-few-ways-that-cloudways-makes-running-this-site-a-little-easier/

A Few Ways That Cloudways Makes Running This Site a Little Easier

It’s probably no surprise to you that CSS-Tricks is (proudly) hosted on Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s managed hosting arm. Given both CSS-Tricks and Cloudways are part of DigitalOcean, it was just a matter of time before we’d come together this way. And here we are!

We were previously hosted on Flywheel which was a fairly boutique WordPress hosting provider until WP Engine purchased it years back. And, to be very honest and up-front, Flywheel served us extremely well. There reached a point when it became pretty clear that CSS-Tricks was simply too big for Flywheel to scale along. That might’ve led us to try out WP Engine in the absence of Cloudways… but it’s probably good that never came to fruition considering recent events.

Anyway, moving hosts always means at least a smidge of contest-switching. Different server names with different configurations with different user accounts with different controls.

We’re a pretty low-maintenance operation around here, so being on a fully managed host is a benefit because I see very little of the day-to-day nuance that happens on our server. The Cloudways team took care of all the heavy lifting of migrating us and making sure we were set up with everything we needed, from SFTP accounts and database access to a staging environment and deployment points.

Our development flow used to go something like this:

Fire up Local (Flywheel’s local development app)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Let a CI/CD pipeline publish the changes

I know, ridiculously simple. But it was also riddled with errors because we didn’t always want to publish changes on push. There was a real human margin of error in there, especially when handling WordPress updates. We could have (and should have) had some sort of staging environment rather than blindly trusting what was working locally. But again, we’re kinduva a ragtag team despite the big corporate backing.

The flow now looks like this:

Fire up Local (we still use it!)

Futz around with local development

Push to main

Publish to staging

Publish to production

This is something we could have set up in Flywheel but was trivial with Cloudways. I gave up some automation for quality assurance’s sake. Switching environments in Cloudways is a single click and I like a little manual friction to feel like I have some control in the process. That might not scale well for large teams on an enterprise project, but that’s not really what Cloudways is all about — that’s why we have DigitalOcean!

See that baseline-status-widget branch in the dropdown? That’s a little feature I’m playing with (and will post about later). I like that GitHub is integrated directly into the Cloudways UI so I can experiment with it in whatever environment I want, even before merging it with either the staging or master branches. It makes testing a whole lot easier and way less error-prone than triggering auto-deployments in every which way.

Here’s another nicety: I get a good snapshot of the differences between my environments through Cloudways monitoring. For example, I was attempting to update our copy of the Gravity Forms plugin just this morning. It worked locally but triggered a fatal in staging. I went in and tried to sniff out what was up with the staging environment, so I headed to the Vulnerability Scanner and saw that staging was running an older version of WordPress compared to what was running locally and in production. (We don’t version control WordPress core, so that was an easy miss.)

I hypothesized that the newer version of Gravity Forms had a conflict with the older version of WordPress, and this made it ridiculously easy to test my assertion. Turns out that was correct and I was confident that pushing to production was safe and sound — which it was.

That little incident inspired me to share a little about what I’ve liked about Cloudways so far. You’ll notice that we don’t push our products too hard around here. Anytime you experience something delightful — whatever it is — is a good time to blog about it and this was clearly one of those times.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Cloudways is ideal for any size or type of WordPress site. It’s one of the few hosts that will let you BOYO cloud, so to speak, where you can hold your work on a cloud server (like a DigitalOcean droplet, for instance) and let Cloudways manage the hosting, giving you all the freedom to scale when needed on top of the benefits of having a managed host. So, if you need a fully managed, autoscaling hosting solution for WordPress like we do here at CSS-Tricks, Cloudways has you covered.

[cssscriptcom]

Bootstrap 5 Select Dropdown Enhancer - AvalynxSelect

AvalynxSelect is a JavaScript plugin that transforms the regular <select> element into a Bootstrap dropdown component with support for live search, custom styles, scrollable lists, and more. How to use it: 1. Download the main script avalynx-select.js and insert it into your Bootstrap project. <link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/cdn/bootstrap.min.css" /> <script…

[ghostshadow-k-r]

More and more unsolved mysteries

Imprisoning those vision with grey grey fog

Swirling in an unprehendable dance

Truth is already nowhere to found

The Izanami that shows on your screen now was not the complete one,because her other part — Marl Velvet still exists out there.They borned from the collective subconsciousness,fulfilling her people's wishes which is granting them a peaceful life.

But as time passes,those desires was start getting complex and more and more distorted.Which let her ended up being separated into two parts like now.

She had choosed somepony and granted them the power of persona to test them what will happen.They are — Dropdown,Steel Volt and also Vital Farm.

There's more,she also created the TV world with fog as one important role in her experiment toward this little town that she has protected all along ever since she appeared.

Could the Special Investigation Team break the fog successfully?Or would the fog blurred their vision?

Let's wait and see.

[tutorialswebsite]

Convert Checkbox Lists into Dropdown on Mobile | Dropdown with Checkbox

Checkboxes are useful when allowing users to select multiple options. A dropdown allows users to tap and expand the options. This video will guide you through A simple process to convert checkbox lists into dropdown on mobile devices to ensuring your forms remain user-friendly on all device.

Watch Video 💻 ➡️: https://youtu.be/g-zDHYHrdiQ

Article link ➡️: https://bit.ly/3B1RH1N

Demo link ➡️: https://bit.ly/47Hz7II

[journeyjottings]

Health and Care Worker Visa Applications Down 76% This Year

In contrast, there has been a steep rise in people applying for the skilled worker visa, as well as their dependents.

The government said the various drops in legal migration show their plan "is working".

Just 12,400 people applied for the Health and Care Worker visa from January to April this year, according to the latest statistics published by the government on Wednesday.

During the same period last year, 50,900 applications were made - 76% more than this year.

In March, the government announced social care workers would no longer be able to bring dependents on their visa.

In April, there was a 58% fall in health and care dependents applying compared with April 2023, in the first full month where statistics are available following the announcement.

There was also a 12% reduction in people applying for the sponsored study visa, from 49,400 to 43,600. A sponsored study visa is where an international student or schoolchild is sponsored by an education provider such as an independent school or university.

Applications for dependents on the sponsored study visa dropped by a dramatic 79%, from 38,900 to 8,300.

Advertisement That fall comes after the government announced last year that from 1 January this year, post-graduate students could not bring dependents unless they were studying for a PhD or other doctorate, or a research-based degree.

In contrast, the number of people applying for a "skilled worker" visa rose by 41%, with their dependents increasing by 62%.

On 4 April, the government increased the minimum salary for the skilled worker visa from £26,200 to £38,700, so there has not yet been a month of statistics following that announcement.

Home Secretary James Cleverly hailed the drop in health and care worker visa applications as he said it was evidence their plan to "deliver the largest-ever cut to legal migration in our country's history is working".

He added: "The British people deserve an immigration system that puts their interests first.

"Our approach is about control and fairness; to the highly skilled coming here who deserve a decent wage, to taxpayers who shouldn't be relied on to support them, and to British workers who shouldn't be undercut.

"We will continue to keep these measures under close review and if needed, we will not hesitate to go further."

Labour's shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, accused the government of "scrambling around, desperately trying to clean up the mess they made" as he pointed to the "record high" in applications to the Skilled Worker visa.

"Labour is clear that we will deliver a Skills and Growth levy to support local people into training, ensure no return to Tory rules that allowed employers to undercut British workers, and make sure migration and skills policy are joined up so we can support the aims of the UK economy," he added.

Source: sky news

[codingflicks]

3D Flipping Dropdown Menu

[codenewbies]

CSS Dropdown Menu

[jcmarchi]

Why Bad Product Data Is Costing Fashion More Than Ever and Where AI Fits In

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/why-bad-product-data-is-costing-fashion-more-than-ever-and-where-ai-fits-in/

Why Bad Product Data Is Costing Fashion More Than Ever and Where AI Fits In

In fashion, visuals are everything. But behind every product description page is data. From the cut of a hem to the color name in a dropdown, product data dictates how items are discovered, displayed, purchased, and returned. When it’s accurate, it quietly powers the entire system. When it’s not, the consequences hit everything from logistics to customer trust.

A 2024 Forrester Consulting study found that 83% of e-commerce leaders admit their product data is incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate, unstructured, or outdated. And the effects aren’t just limited to the backend. Poor product data delays launches, limits visibility, frustrates customers, and drives up returns. In fashion, where precision drives sales and margins are tight, that becomes a serious liability.

As brands scale across more retail channels, the problem multiplies. Managing dozens of formatting requirements, image standards, and taxonomies at once adds layers of complexity. But multimodal AI–models that can process both images and text–is emerging as a tool that can finally address these challenges at scale.

When Product Data Undercuts the Sale

Every product page in digital retail is a customer touchpoint, and in fashion, that interaction demands accuracy. Mislabeling a color, omitting a material, or mismatching an image with its description doesn’t just look unprofessional, it disturbs the buying experience.

And it matters to shoppers. According to industry research:

42% of shoppers abandon their carts when product information is incomplete.

70% exit a product page entirely if the description feels unhelpful or vague.

87% say they’re unlikely to buy again after receiving an item that doesn’t match its online listing.

And when products are purchased based on inaccurate product descriptions, brands are being hit hard by returns. In 2024 alone, 42% of returns in the fashion sector were attributed to misrepresented or incomplete product information. For an industry already burdened by return costs and waste, the impact is hard to ignore.

And that’s only if the shopper ever sees the product—error-ridden data can tank visibility, burying items before they even have a chance to convert, leading to lower sales overall.

Why Fashion’s Data Problem Isn’t Going Away

If the issue is this widespread, why hasn’t the industry solved it? Because fashion product data is complicated, inconsistent, and often unstructured. And as more marketplaces emerge, the expectations keep shifting.

Every brand manages catalogs differently. Some rely on manual spreadsheets, others wrestle with rigid in-house systems, and many are tangled up in complex PIMs or ERPs. Meanwhile, retailers impose their own rules: one requires cropped torso shots, another insists on white backgrounds. Even the wrong color name–”orange” instead of “carrot”–can get a listing rejected.

These inconsistencies translate into a tremendous amount of manual work. A single SKU might need several different formatting passes to meet partner requirements. Multiply that by thousands of products and dozens of retail channels, and it’s no surprise that teams spend as much as half of their time just correcting data issues.

And while they’re doing that, priorities like seasonal launches and growth strategy fall behind. Listings go live missing key attributes, or are blocked entirely. Customers scroll past or purchase with incorrect expectations. The process meant to support growth becomes a recurring source of drag.

The Case for Multimodal AI

This is exactly the kind of problem multimodal AI is built to address. Unlike traditional automation tools, which rely on structured inputs, multimodal systems can analyze and make sense of both text and images, similar to how a human merchandiser would.

It can scan a photo and a product title, recognize design features like flutter sleeves or a V-neckline, and assign the correct category and tags required by a retailer. It can standardize inconsistent labels, mapping “navy,” “midnight,” and “indigo” to the same core value, while filling in missing attributes like material or fit.

At the technical level, this is made possible by vision-language models (VLMs) — advanced AI systems that jointly analyze product images and text (titles, descriptions) to understand each item holistically. These transformer-based models are trained on platform requirements, real-world listing performance, and historical catalog data. Over time, they get smarter, learning retailer taxonomies and fine-tuning predictions based on feedback and outcomes.

Tasks that used to take weeks can now be completed in hours, without sacrificing accuracy.

Why Clean Data Speeds Everything Up

When product data is complete, consistent, and well-organized, everything else runs much more smoothly. Items surface in the right searches, launch without delays, and appear in the filters customers actually use. The product shoppers see online is the one that arrives at their door.

That kind of clarity leads to tangible results across the entire retail operation. Retailers can onboard SKUs without lengthy back-and-forths. Marketplaces prioritize listings that meet their standards, improving visibility and placement. When information is clear and consistent, shoppers are more likely to convert and less likely to return what they bought. Even support teams benefit, with fewer complaints to resolve and less confusion to manage.

Scaling Without the Burnout

Brands aren’t just selling through their own sites anymore. They’re going live across Amazon, Nordstrom, Farfetch, Bloomingdale’s, and a long list of marketplaces, each with its own evolving requirements. Keeping up manually is exhausting, and over time, unrealistic and unsustainable.

Multimodal AI changes that by helping brands build adaptive infrastructure. These systems don’t just tag attributes, they learn over time. As new marketplace-specific rules are introduced or product photography evolves, listings can be updated and reformatted quickly, without starting from scratch.

Some tools go further, automatically generating compliant image sets, identifying gaps in attribute coverage, and even tailoring descriptions for specific regional markets. The goal isn’t to replace human teams. It’s to free them up to focus on what makes the brand unique, while letting AI handle the repetitive, rule-based tasks that slow them down.

Let Brands Be Creative and Let AI Handle the Rest

Fashion thrives on originality, not manual data entry. Messy product data can quietly derail even the strongest brands. When the basics aren’t right, everything else–from visibility to conversion to retention–starts to slip.

Multimodal AI offers a realistic, scalable path forward. It helps brands move faster without losing control, and brings order to a part of the business that’s long been defined by chaos.

Fashion moves fast. The brands that succeed will be the ones with systems built to keep up.

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

@support @staff what in the world is going on? I keep getting auth errors when I try to post things and when I tried to log out in order to log back in the website keeps error looping me to the offline tumblr page rather than logging me in properly.

this is like my 4th attempt to log in by going to the login page directly via URL. It also seems to have locked me onto the bright white colour scheme, nothing I click is working? Drafts are saving but nothing else is functional?

[cssscriptcom]

Convert HTML Lists into Custom Dropdowns - Simple Select

Simple Select is a lightweight custom select JavaScript library that transforms regular HTML lists into highly customizable and fully accessible dropdowns. Features No external dependencies. Just vanilla JS and CSS. Provides structure and basic behavior, but zero styling opinions. You control the look entirely. Uses straightforward CSS classes (simple-select-trigger, simple-select-dropdown,…

[hailsatanacab]

about to make another spreadsheet. truly one of life's great joys

[honkbird]

The big art post !! the behind-the-scenes of the tribalhunter PNGtuber stuff ! At least on the art side-- I can talk about the coding mechanics but that's not quite my place to. The high-level overview of that is there's some cool stuff going on with memory wrappers and godot to get stuff shake'n and jamm'n The rest of it is below the cut just so you don't have to scroll tons if you don't care, but take some time and read !! 3 days of work y'know !!

The first sketches were started at 10 pm tuesday the 15th. I tweaked it with some edits until about 1 am

For people working on pngs or long term projects -- make notes !! genuinely !! you can see "ok what was i thinking when i did this" and it made like infinitely easier. You might notice that stage 2 png was not long for this world -- we ended up cutting that one and shifting 3-5 down a stage, and just making a larger final stage. The night ended with: these!

Larger final, we moved where some hands ended up, cleaned some notes, and so on

Wednesday I got to work

on some second pass ones, e.g., cleaner lineart. Mind you, not final! To have proper safespace with the png we had to make actual layered sections to avoid ripped seams on squashing and stretching and rotating and etc.

These also had the first of the talk sprites! I don't do entirely new sprites for the talking ones just because of the pure quantity of images. So, just an arm tilt and head angling. This means we have mute and a talk variants of a few sprites (e.g., the stage 1 is 3 sprites. Body, scarf flappies, and head. We have talk versions of the body and the head). Also, he used to have nips! there was going to be a slightly darker purple but we scrapped it for . well . obvious reasons. We went with classy scarf modesty.

This is how you know you're doing well!

Thursday I started on the finals!

This was the first one sent -- showing off the layers. Tip, I used to layer based on like "back arm" "head" "fore body" etc. It's weirder to get used to when you use numbered layers, but holy shit it made importing easier. You automatically know the layer order to put them in to avoid clipping. Getting these done I got to work on testing 'em too!

this gave us our first working model! Oh, he used to have black robes too! this was to match the custom ingame sprites he got, but the color wasn't quite popping enough. The scarf saturation would later be turned up too, and more color adjusting. But this was workable! A lovely demo. All that was left was design tweaks and the talk sprites!

Friday was dedicated to

figuring out the colors and the talk sprites. For giggles, here's a bunch of variants produced!

We changed the robes, the scarf tone, and his lower gradient. neat Brave fact, his design has a gradient! It's horrible for gif compression! With all that done, then came doing well . all of the sprites!

Note, the talk sprites had some copied mute ones for visual reference. Gotta be consistent! It was at this point the pngtuber was "done", so to speak. Talk sprites worked and everything uh . jiggled right. But I still had a whole weekend! There wasn't as much photo evidence. What WAS changed between then and the final was: 1) the gradient was shifted to be a smooth curve instead of dappling 2) the talk sprite for stage 5's beak was fixed to remove a tangent line 3) the belly for stage 5 was rounded out to be more consistent with the game (less "doughy" to quote) 4) we added another sprite for the arm on stage 5 to layer better. Those changes weren't done until about Saturday, and then the code was tweaked all the way up until adding damage and transition effects on sunday and monday!

P.S., the model still clipped in the end a little! The code did some growth based on the fullness factor and . uh. wow!

Anway woo !! that was some wip photos and stories, I wish there was more of an intense struggle to tell but it was pretty quickly done. My shoulderblade hurts a bit to tell the truth and I think I overdid it on the pace but hooray!

[timethehobo]

The way Rook stiffens up when they drop from a ledge tho. X’D

[antiadvil]

Thanks Google AI. I think it's really important that Dan chose to respect Dan and Phil's privacy that way

[it-crowd-unexpected-reboot]

Update #2: A New Outlining Method, Dropdown Plotter

I've been having a hard time conceptualizing how to plan out a novel lately. It used to come so easy to me. Now that I'm a real adult, it feels like there isn't enough space in my brain anymore for me to have my story all in my head without writing my ideas down somewhere.

So, good outlining methods, which can be hard to come by, are crucial for my writing process.

But, a lot of traditional methods don't work for me.

In my opinion, it's extremely important to have an outlining method that doesn't overwhelm you, and which feels creatively freeing. And when do I need to be more creatively free, than when writing an IT Crowd fanfiction?

So I've come up with a new outlining method that I'd love to share with you all! I call it Dropdown Plotter.

Dropdown Plotter uses the dropdown menu feature, which can be found in both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, to help you better visualize (and, most importantly, easily reorganize) the major aspects of each chapter of your story.

Basically, it's a spreadsheet that includes, at minimum, 8 columns.

Chapter Title

Plotlines

Included Character(s)

Perspective Character(s)

Location(s)

Chapter Story Description

Writing Stage

Due Date

Why keep track of these things? Balance. Basically, making sure your characters, plotlines, POVs, and important locations all get adequate page time.

It's a lot easier to conceptualize these things when you have it on a color-coded spreadsheet, zoomed out really far, and can see in a big picture way. For example, you might see that the red color indicating "Legolas" is in a scene, drops off after Chapter 17. You might see that the green-coded plot about his missing shoe is only important for 5 chapters in the middle of the story, or that we're spending almost the entire story in the bathroom and never in the evil lair.

So, how do you use the Dropdown Plotter?

First, you go into the dropdown menu, and you can see all the plots you've selected. There's a handy "search feature" for those writing the next Game of Thrones. You want to click the little pencil icon in the bottom right, which is the "edit" button.

On the right-hand side of your screen, a column will pop up called "Data Validation Rules." From here, you can edit the names and colors of each item in the dropdown menu, and add or delete things as you'd like.

Make sure to click "allow multiple selections" on the bottom of the data validation rules pop-up. This will allow you to select multiple characters, multiple locations, and multiple plots when you're in the dropdown menus.

Don't forget to click "Done" at the bottom!

On top of the dropdown menus, the nice thing about working in a spreadsheet is that you can always drag and drop the rows and columns. This makes it extremely easy to change the order of scenes around, in a way that feels very impermanent and easy.

Here is what my Dropdown Plotter looked like for the first three chapters of The Grant: An IT Crowd Fanfiction.

Looks pretty, right? And pretty outlines build confidence! Not only that, but what I like most about this outlining method is that it encourages me to be less precious with my ideas.

It's way less intimidating to overhaul major aspects of your story, such as the dominant POV, the main plot, etc., when all you have to do is click a little button in the dropdown menu to change everything. When I'm editing a little blurb in a spreadsheet versus an entire step outline, it reminds me that no writing problem is insurmountable, and nothing is ever really set in stone.

Again, it builds confidence.

Unfortunately, I've only built a Dropdown Plotter in Google Sheets, but I've provided a blank version to share with you all. The nice thing about spreadsheets is that you can add and delete things as you see fit. For example, some people might want to add...

More columns indicating multiple scenes within the same chapter!

A "Story Beat" column, to mark the specific plot beats each chapter follows (as in the Hero's Journey or the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet).

An "Important Info" column, to mark any worldbuilding or character details discussed or introduced in a certain chapter.

Literally anything your little heart desires!

Happy outlining and I hope you enjoy the Dropdown Plotter!