Matt JohnsonVapoorize. Because life is tough enough.
Some work weeks can feel like death by a thousand papercuts, amirite? On Monday, you’ve got a clear desk, a perfectly planned checklist, and a positive outlook on building beautiful, functional websites. But then the winds change, and you get a whiff of the workweek to come.
That’s right. By Wednesday, work-week poo-nado has touched down, and it’s a stinking mess, and now you’re trying to shovel out of a stinking heap of (count ’em) 203 new emails.
Admittedly, getting icons on your site and ensuring they’re loading as they should, might be a small part of your week’s disaster. But when it comes to time and resources, every bit counts, especially during poo-nado week.
The bummer part is that you coulda signed up for Font Awesome Pro and used Pro Kits to turn poo-nado week into Small Craft Advisory Week. This is where Font Awesome Kits could have given you back some time.
But what is a Kit? Glad you asked. Our Kits are little bundles of settings and icon joy that are the best way to use Font Awesome. By creating a Kit, you’ll: Save time getting icons on your website and loading icons from CDN can help speed up your site.
4 Ways Pro Kits Vapoorize Time and Resource Problems
When you add up those death by a thousand papercuts tasks related to icons, Kits could have really come in handy. Week after week, month after month, that’s a heck of a lot of hours you could be crushing it. Instead, you’re fiddling with lines of code like it’s a snarled ball of yarn in a cat’s cradle game gone bad and trying to figure out why a page won’t load faster. And on and on it goes.
Here’s a short list of how Kits can help you unsnarl your poo-nado week.
1. Kits simplify your projects.
When you’ve got multiple projects, we recommend setting up a Kit for each project or website you work on. That way, you can configure the version, icon styles, and settings you want to use individually.
When would this matter? Keeping Kits separated also allows you to protect your domain so you can ensure that only the sites you authorize can load your Kit. By locking them down, you won’t get dinged by overages due to unauthorized use. Let’s say you need to whitelist a Kit so that only Joe’s beers’ website can load a particular Kit.
However, if you’ve got two different sites that you need to authorize for use, then protecting them both won’t necessarily stop you from getting dinged on overages.
Say you managed Bob’s Earthworm Pâté Mart, and also Karl’s Smoked Meats. And let’s say Karl’s site is super high-traffic, so high that there might be legitimate pageview overages. But Bobs’ site is low traffic.
It might be nice to separate the Kits for each of these sites, so you can see Kit page view counts for each site, instead of mixing the low-traffic site’s pageviews with the high-traffic site’s page views.
It wouldn’t change your liability for paying for overages, but it would help you to better account for where page views come from.
2. Kits allow you to upload your own icons.
You can now upload your own icons to a Kit and easily use them right alongside your Font Awesome icons! Icon upload immediately processes your icon so you can see what it will look like alongside Font Awesome icons, and once saved it’s immediately available for use on your site.
3. Kits put you at the front of the line for new icons.
When you set a Kit to use the latest version of Font Awesome, you can automagically use new icons right when they’re released. No extra setup time is required! Check out our latest release.
When might this matter? Well, without the Kit feature, you’d have to manually update Font Awesome every time there’s a new release. Which, let’s not forget, includes some significant poo-nado tasks like:
- Downloading all of the asset files.
- Uploading them to your own web server.
- Updating the asset URLs in your page templates
… and the list goes on.
For a Pro Dev, this whole process could take a mere ten minutes, one-handed while playing a game of darts, but, you know, then there’s the rest of us, and this whole process could take a lot of time, and produce quite the headache.
4. Kits allow you to auto subset your icons.
At Font Awesome, we’re all about those options. If you prefer to self-host your icons, you can use our Desktop Subsetter. But if that method seems overly involved, Kits allow you to essentially “auto subset” your icons to load only the icons your site uses. There are no buttons to push or features to enable there–it’s just how Pro Kits work.
Get Font Awesome Pro Kits to Help Avoid Poo-nado Week
If you’re a regular user of Font Awesome free, you could avoid many of the problems associated with poo-nado week by going Pro and using our Kits. Even if you only save an hour per month for each challenge listed here, Font Awesome Pro would pay for itself — in ONE month!
