Thanks for attending my presentation at CSS Dev Conf 2015 in Long Beach, California! Below you’ll find the slide deck for this presentation along with links to all the resources used and discussed. jQuery Talk: The DOM is a Mess ECMAScript Specification MDN Links for DOM Features insertAdjacentHTML getBoundingClientRect getClientRects The dataset property event.currentTarget hasAttribute […]
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.
Thanks for watching my talk at FITC Toronto 2015! On this page you’ll find the slides from my presentation along with a full list of all the links from the presentation. Intro / Bio FITC 2015 talk page SitePoint Jump Start CSS Book HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World: 2nd Edition @ImpressiveWebs Web Tools […]
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.
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.
What ever happened to CSS galleries?
I always thought the term “CSS galleries” was a bit of a misnomer. I have no idea who came up with that phrase, but it really makes little sense. Those galleries were not just showing off “CSS”, as the name implies. But I guess because of the CSS boom that was happening around 6-7 years ago, the name seemed to fit and nobody had a problem with it.
Also, I don’t think it’s likely that all the websites that were submitted to such galleries had beautiful CSS. I’m sure many of them were as bloated and hacky as the worst of them. And I’m sure the JavaScript on those sites was mostly awful (in the head, lots of HTTP requests — kind of like WordPress, but without WordPress).
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.
Lately I’ve been working hard on my weekly newsletter Web Tools Weekly, which focuses on tools for front-end developers.
The newsletter was originally supposed to include design-related tools on occasion, then I changed my mind and kept it mostly developer focused. Unfortunately, this left me with a huge list of useful design, color, and typography related tools that I’ve compiled over the last 6 months or so.
So here is everything I’ve compiled, dumped into one big cheesy post for your artificial browsing pleasure. :)
Some things in the specs have behaviours that browser makers are required to adhere to. But other areas are a bit gray, where there is no definite guidance on implementation, so sometimes the behaviour is different from browser to browser.
Take a look, for example, at the select() method, which allows you to use JavaScript to select the text inside an input or textarea element.
As you might already know, CSS transitions and animations allow you to animate a specific set of CSS properties. One of the properties that cannot be animated is the display property.
It would be great if we could do it, but it’s not currently possible and I’m guessing it never will be (e.g. how would you animate to “display: table”?). But there are ways to work around it, and I’ll present one way here.
