I was unsure of what to write about this week and then I remembered that I had been meaning to post something to promote and give away a hard copy of a book that No Starch Press was kind enough to give me for free.
Below I’ll give you some simple instructions on how you can win my brand new copy of The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne. You’ll never believe what you have to do to qualify for this one! (Note the sarcasm.) But first, a description of the book.
Where would the web be without links? Links are what hold together what we know as the World Wide Web. Without links, the World Wide Web would be more appropriately called the World Wide Set Of Unrelated Pages, or, incidentally, WWSOUP.
While it’s great how simple and effective the process is of “linking” pages together, I think there’s room for improvement.
In Divya Manian’s controversial post on Smashing Magazine discussing HTML semantics, something that she said got somewhat overlooked in all the debates that ensued.
At the end of the article, she pointed out that rather than wasting time debating HTML tag use, developers should focus on learning how to program. I think this is great advice. So to that end, I’ve compiled a roundup of sources where beginners can expand their skills past HTML and CSS.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about CSS3′s word-wrap property. The angle of the article was the fact that it was a feature that was new in CSS3 that didn’t exist in CSS2.1 and it worked in just about every browser, including old IE.
Well, now that’s all changed, which I discovered while researching additions to my CSS3 Click Chart. The word-wrap property has been removed from the CSS3 spec and other related properties have been added.
Over the past month or so I’ve been slowly working on a redesign and revamp of my CSS3 Click Chart.
A whole slew of things have changed. Here’s a summary.
On a current project, I was trying to find a way to auto-resize a textarea according to some content that would be loaded in dynamically via Ajax. I didn’t know the height of the content and the textarea element doesn’t resize naturally like other HTML elements, so I needed to update the height of the element with JavaScript each time the content changed.
It seemed like a simple task. After doing a search to see what types of plugins and scripts were floating around to do this, the examples I found seemed a little overly complex. While most solutions seemed to incorporate some complex math calculations, I thought of a better way.
Yesterday I tweeted the following: “On current client project, client says CSS only needs to work in Chrome. Let me know how jealous you are.”
The results weren’t too surprising. Below I brainstormed a list of some other things we wish clients would say. I guess this is the polar opposite of what you find here, except these quotes aren’t real. Enjoy.
A trackback on one of my previous posts (yeah, trackbacks aren’t just for spam) alerted me to an interesting point brought up by a blogger named Matt Pass. In his post entitled Walnut, Meet jQuery Sledgehammer he politely explains why he feels it’s overkill to use jQuery in a simple tutorial post.
His main point is summarized in this quote: “Do you really need a 90k JavaScript library (and thats the minified version) to toggle the size of a menu?”
In a recent post wherein I questioned the legitimacy of W3schools’ subdomains, someone pointed out that my own site was suffering from a somewhat related problem.
Basically, if anyone typed a random subdomain in place of the “www”, the subdomain would remain in place in the address bar without any redirection occurring. So for example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.impressivewebs.com, the site would display as normal, except with the “peanutbuttersandwich” part still intact.
What’s worse is that I have other domains on my current hosting plan, and impressivewebs.com is the primary domain. So if someone typed in a subdomain for one of the other domains, they would actually see the impressivewebs.com home page. For example, if you visited peanutbuttersandwich.animiationfillcode.com, you would see the impressivewebs.com home page with the animationfillcode.com URL still in the address bar.
As a front-end developer, I’m constantly trying to learn new skills and technologies and adding to what I already know. Front-end developer job postings, however, vary from posting to posting so the list of different languages, libraries, and technologies that could theoretically fall under the category of front-end developer skills is quite large.
Here’s a list (that I’ll continue to update) containing a wide variety of skills and technologies that I think all front-end developers should be working on learning, at least to some extent. I certainly don’t know all of these, nor do I expect anyone else to.
The list is not necessarily in any particular order, but I tried to keep the more rudimentary stuff at or near the top. Also, many of the items overlap others, so there’s a lot of cross-over within the list. And of course the list has lots of potential for improvements (more on that below).