Impressive Webs, Toronto | Web Design Articles & Tutorials

DOM Features You Didn’t Know Existed (Video & Slides)

DOM Features You Didn't Know Existed If you subscribe to my newsletter then you’re probably aware that in the past couple of years I’ve done a lot of research and writing on DOM-related stuff. I don’t consider myself a JavaScript expert; pretty far from it, actually. But I like the DOM. I think it’s easy to use, and it’s in greater shape today than it was five or so years ago when jQuery was pretty much the only choice for cross-browser DOM manipulation.

As a result of all this recent work (some of which I collected together in a JavaScript/DOM e-book), I was able to put together a presentation that I had the privilege of delivering at two different conferences: CSS Dev Conf 2015 in Long Beach, California in October, and FITC Toronto 2016 on April 18.

The presentation at CSS Dev Conf wasn’t recorded, but the FITC version was (without the Octopus, though!). So below you’ll find the video of my talk, the slides, and links to all the resources and features that I discuss in the presentation. I’ve also included JS Bin demo links for most of the features. Enjoy!

CSS Positioning Basics (Screencast)

A couple of years ago I wrote an article for a company called Thinkful on CSS positioning, which also included a screencast that I hosted on my ImpressiveWebs YouTube channel. The video was “unlisted” but I’ve now made it public, and since some time has passed I thought I would post the video here.

It’s pretty basic stuff for most experienced CSS developers, but if anyone wants a quick primer on CSS positioning, this should be a good guide. The video is embedded below and I’ve summarized the content here in this post.

My Talk and Slides from FITC Toronto 2015

On Tuesday, April 14, I had the privilege of speaking at FITC Toronto 2015, a technology and creativity conference that features events all around the globe, many of them in Canada. It was my second talk ever, and it seemed to go over pretty well. This was a 4-track conference, so it was nice to see a packed room with standing-room only (or so they told me — as you can see from the video below, those lights blind the speaker to what’s going on in the room!).

My talk was focused on the tools explosion that we’ve seen in the front-end development industry in the past 5 years or so. If you’ve been following my tools newsletter for some time, then you would have seen some, if not most, of the stuff in the talk. But I did go in depth on a few of the tools that I featured, so there should be something new in here for most front-end developers.

How to Write Great Web Development Articles and Tutorials

Pen and Paper As some of you probably already know, since January 2014 I’ve been working for SitePoint as one of their Managing Editors, mostly editing HTML, CSS, and Sass content. I’ve also helped out with Mobile content, JavaScript, some general Web stuff (Git articles, build tools, and other generic content), and I write SitePoint’s primary newsletter each week.

I love my job at SitePoint—it’s the best job I’ve ever had. As long as SitePoint still wants me working for them, I hope I can continue to help them put out better and better content for front-end developers.

I’ve rejected or sent back for editing quite a few articles since I’ve started my editing duties. Many of those rejections suffered from the same problems. So for this post, I’ve put together my thoughts on what I think makes for a good web development article or tutorial.

A JavaScript & DOM E-Book Offer

A JavaScript & DOM E-Book Offer As many of you know, I publish a weekly newsletter called Web Tools Weekly that’s now gained a pretty nice subscriber base of over 10,000. In addition to the weekly list of categorized tools, each issue usually starts with a brief tutorial or tip, usually something focused on JavaScript and the DOM.

After 80+ issues, I’ve amassed quite a bit of JavaScript- and DOM-focused content. All of that content is available for free in the Web Tools Weekly archives. However, for those who would like to read the tips on a tablet or mobile device, I thought it would be useful to put it together in book form in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. So I’ve just released JavaScript & DOM Tips, Tricks, and Techniques, a collection of 70 tips (125+ pages in PDF), priced at $5.

Displaying Your MailChimp Subscriber Count with PHP and MailChimp’s API

As many of you probably know, I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter called Web Tools Weekly for over a year now. Most issues begin with a brief JavaScript tutorial, after which I include a curated list of tools primarily focused on front-end development. I’ve released a new issue every week, without a break, since July 2013 and I use MailChimp to produce the mailing (disclosure: previous link has my affiliate ID attached, which means we both get $30 towards MailChimp if you become a paying customer).

The subscriber count has grown to almost 10,000 as of this writing, and that number is growing by about 70 each week. For the past couple of months, I’ve been displaying the subscriber count on the home page, and manually editing it every once in a while.

onchange vs. oninput for Range Sliders

Free range eggs A common UI pattern for a range slider is to allow the user to move the slider and display the value of it somewhere on the page, changing the displayed value as the user moves the slider.

I think the expected behaviour in such a case is that the value should display instantly, as the user is moving the slider, rather than the page waiting for the slider to finish moving before the displayed value is updated. I suppose there could be cases where you prefer a delay over instant results, but I think the expected behaviour is to display the results instantly.

As you’ll see in the videos below and in your own testing, the behaviour of the input event compared to the change event is not exactly the same in different browsers when applied to a range slider.

Frontend RSS Feeds Revisited

Back in 2008, Paul Irish posted a modest list of RSS feeds for front-end developers to follow. Since that original post, he’s updated the list multiple times, and his list is now on GitHub growing to over 200 feeds.

It looks like the list hasn’t been updated in 6 months or more. Not a really big deal, but I noticed when I imported the OPML into my feed reader, there were a number of broken feeds, empty feeds, and feeds not updated in quite some time.

For a while now I’ve wanted to put together my own list of front-end feeds, so here it is.

Cursor-Over-Text Behaviour in Browsers

Cursor-Over-Text Behaviour in Browsers By default, in all major browsers, when you hover your mouse over text on a web page, the cursor changes from the regular arrow (the “default” cursor) to a “text” cursor.

You can see this demonstrated in the GIF below or by simply testing it out on just about any web page:

w3schools: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good

For the record, I don’t hate w3schools. Apparently, a lot of people find their website useful. And from a human perspective, I’m happy for their success. After all, it’s run by one or more people, just like you and me, who have to feed their families.

But with everything we know about SEO and web development best practices, their ability to remain at the top of search results and also be in the top 200 most-visited websites in the world even after Google has made so many updates to their ranking algorithms, baffles us all.

In this post I’ll attempt to analyze a number of things about the w3schools.com website, both good and bad (mostly bad) and see if we can’t learn a few things and draw some conclusions.