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Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Cool Web Developer Tools – Koala and Chrome Remote Preview

Friday, March 22nd, 2013
Cool Web Developer Tools – Koala and Chrome Remote Preview

Don’t like the command line? Fear no more!

I saw a tweet the other day that told of a way to compile Sass, LESS, or CoffeeScript without using the command line. Enter Koala, a cool little app to help you make the jump to preprocessors as painless as possible. Normally I use the command line and type in ‘compass watch’ and forget about it. It really isn’t that difficult, but a lot of people seem to get scared when confronted with it. If all you want to do is compile, I really don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t use Koala. The interface is incredibly easy, with very few buttons or options. The ones it does have, are the ones you would most commonly use. Take a look at the image below and see what I mean.

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Posted in Sass/Less/Compass, Web Development | No Comments »

Using Jade As An HTML Preprocessor Through Nodefront

Monday, September 24th, 2012
Using Jade As An HTML Preprocessor Through Nodefront

No CodeKit for PC…now what?

I have been watching Chris Coyier’s redesign videos and have been learning a lot from the first few I’ve seen. I remembered him talking about using Jade. He hasn’t gone into it in the videos, and I will assume he is not using it in the redesign, but I haven’t gotten far enough to know. What is Jade? It is a template engine that according to the documentation, is heavily influenced by Haml, an HTML preprocessor. You know, take out all the cluttered syntax? Of course Jade can do a lot more, but I was mainly interested in using it for its most basic use. Get rid of some clutter in my HTML.

The main problem though is Chris uses Codekit, which does a lot of cool things, and one seems to be compiling the Jade files into HTML. Unfortunately, CodeKit is only for the Mac with no real hope of ever crossing over. So I needed to find a different way to get Jade to work for me. Not an easy task for someone who has no idea how to even impliment it. After a lot of reading and searching, this is how I got it to work.

UPDATE 1/28/13: Below in the Final Thoughts section I mention that I wish Nodefront could output pretty html (non-condensed). I was informed a short while ago by the creator that it can. See the Update section further down to read how.
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Posted in NodeJS | No Comments »

Magento – Adding CMS Pages To The Main Navigation

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
Magento – Adding CMS Pages To The Main Navigation

Magento is NOT WordPress

So recently I have had to dive into learning how to theme Magento. Which is good, because I have always wanted to learn, and while I tried in the past, I just never had the time. You know how it is. Work is providing this opportunity, and I want to share something of my findings with you. One thing in particular, because it is such a pain in the ass. First though, let me start by saying that Magento is NOT WordPress. Obviously, right? I thought though, that some things would be similar. One issue was adding a CMS Page to the Main Navigation. One would think that this would be easy enough to do, but it is not. It is actually extremely frustrating if you have no idea how to do it. For all that Magento is, what it is not is an easy to use content management system. It is a store, which sounds stupid because everyone knows that, but while it does that well, it does some things poorly. If you have had trouble, like me, and searched for the answer, you came across some pages that didn’t explain how to do what you are asking, or gave links to extensions to Magento to do it for you. Here is the quickest way possible to add a cms page to the main navigation.

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Posted in Magento | 19 Comments »

jQuery – Creating Elements Part II: HTML5 Data Attributes

Friday, July 13th, 2012
jQuery – Creating Elements Part II: HTML5 Data Attributes

Just when I think HTML5 sucks…

It still annoys the crap out of me, but there are some cool things in there. I just hate when people throw that word around like “We want to redo this flash to be HTML5.” What the hell does that mean exactly? And if you ask them, they have absolutely no idea. Its just a buzz word they are throwing around trying not to sound like they are out of touch. On a current project that I am working on, I came across a problem I needed to solve.

I needed to load videos on a page using the HTML5 video tag, with a flash fall back. The problem though is that there were about ten of them on the page, and the browser was reading the source tags and loading them. If this were just one video, this wouldn’t be a problem, but there were more and it was slowing things down.

The Solution

Which was to load the video on the fly when the flyout was triggered, but I needed to figure out how to get the right video to go with it. This is how I solved it.

As usual we’ll start with the HTML. First we have the link that will open the modal window. You don’t need to see the javascript that actually controls the modal, cause you can figure that out on your own. DO pay attention to the attributes on them.

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Posted in Javascript | No Comments »

jQuery – Creating Elements Part I: Using The each() Function

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012
jQuery – Creating Elements Part I: Using The each() Function

Generating a list

I’m working on a project that required an unordered list. Who the hell cares, right? Well the list was the navigation for a timeline slider. Each block of content on the timeline needed its own list item to move the slider’s position so that the block was centered. The problem though was I didn’t know how many blocks there would be, and I wasn’t sure who would be making the changes later, if there were any. So here is a way to create a list, based on the number of other elements and their ‘rel’ attributes.

I know that barely makes sense, but you will understand once you see what I’m doing. Take a look at the demo…

View Demo

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Posted in Javascript | No Comments »

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