Articles By: Louis Lazaris

What is JSON? An Introduction and Guide for Beginners

By Louis Lazaris / March 1, 2017 / 18 Comments

What is JSON? An Introduction and Guide for Beginners If you’re new to web development and have some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and possibly a little bit of JavaScript, a practical area in which to expand your front-end skills is JSON.

But even if you already have a basic understanding of what JSON is and have used it in some of your projects, there might be a few things you weren’t aware of. So in this JSON tutorial and guide, I’m attempting to provide a fairly comprehensive discussion of JSON, its history, and its usefulness. I’ll close with a list of some practical JSON tools that might come in handy in future projects.

npm for Beginners: A Guide for Front-end Developers

By Louis Lazaris / January 25, 2017 / 24 Comments

npm for Beginners Unless you’ve been under a transpiler-sized rock for the past five years or you’re an absolute beginner to front-end coding, then you’ve probably heard of npm.

Maybe you’ve clicked through to the GitHub repo of a tool of some kind, and you noticed the installation instructions had a couple of different possibilities, including something like this:

New Design for Web Tools Weekly

By Louis Lazaris / January 5, 2017 / 1 Comment

New Design for Web Tools Weekly Since July 2013, I’ve curated a weekly newsletter called Web Tools Weekly. It’s been my primary side project which, admittedly, has taken time away from this blog. I’m planning to be more active on Impressive Webs again this year, but I felt it was time for a fresh new design for the newsletter. The new design launches in this week’s issue.

The redesign was done by a local friend of mine, Priscilla Di Carlo. Although I could have put something together myself, I don’t consider myself a true designer, so I preferred to pay someone to give it a fresh look. Priscilla is mostly a print designer, but since this is email design, I feel like that’s an advantage more than anything.

Fixing Styles on `code` Tags Nested Inside Links

By Louis Lazaris / November 29, 2016 / 2 Comments

Fixing Styles on `code` Tags Nested Inside Links One thing that’s common in development blog posts and documentation is the use of HTML’s <code> tags to mark up code snippets inline and in large blocks (the latter of which is usually done along with <pre> tags).

One of the problems that occurs with styling of <code> tags, however, is when they’re used inline inside of links (or <a> elements).

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

By Louis Lazaris / April 27, 2016 / 3 Comments

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)

By Louis Lazaris / April 23, 2015 / 20 Comments

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

By Louis Lazaris / April 21, 2015 / 0 comments

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

By Louis Lazaris / March 18, 2015 / 54 Comments

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

By Louis Lazaris / March 9, 2015 / 2 Comments

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

By Louis Lazaris / October 22, 2014 / 29 Comments

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.