More changes…added LinkedIn link

May 5th, 2010

I’ve made some more changes, as well as updated my portfolio. Check it out if you like by clicking on the Portfolio link in the navigation at the top. I’ve also added a LinkedIn icon in my sidebar, where you can view my public profile. Also changed the Twitter icon, as I wasn’t fond of the one I was using on this layout. Just didn’t fit well.

Still chuggin’ away perfecting The Web Machine here, which of course will never really be done, cause I like to change things up. Speaking of which I also have been thinking of updating my portfolio site (as in the whole thing). Not sure what I want to do, but its on the list of things to do.

Nothing struck my fancy for a topic today, but I did find out that Firefox 3.6 supports the CSS3 text-shadow style. It didn’t before, at least in 3.1 it didn’t, so I am not exactly sure when that came about, but it works well enough now!

I used it on my Post titles and the Sidebar h2 tags:

text-shadow: 2px 2px 3px #CCCCCC;

If you didn’t know, you do now…have fun with that. Used it on a micro-site I am building for work. I’ll post a link once it goes live so you can see.

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Suggested reading for jQuery beginners….oh and a cool plugin

May 4th, 2010

First let me say I’m sorry it has been a few days since my last blog post. I was summoned for jury duty, and then my kids were dealing with being sick over the weekend. Rough ride since last Thursday. On the plus side with the jury duty thing, I did get to read a lot of my jQuery 1.3 book (I know, stop telling me about 1.4…that book isn’t out yet!).

Now…the plug-in. This is an extension for Firebug – FireQuery. Watch the screen cast they have on that page to see what it does. Seems cool. You can inject jQuery onto any page you want. Even if it doesn’t have it.

Next on the list, I suggest reading this article over at Nettuts. VERY basic stuff, but it shows you, through Firebug’s console, how bad coding habits can really start to drag your load time down. I’ll give you one quick example of what the author goes into, so you will know if you want to go check it out.

console.profile() ;    
    $(".selected");  
console.profileEnd();

According to the article, this will take .308 ms. While this:

console.profile() ;    
    $("li.selected");  
console.profileEnd();

Will take .291 ms. “So the hell what,” you say. I agree…milliseconds?? Who cares? Now take a .js page full of jQuery, and a website that has hundreds, if not thousands of nodes. jQuery has to go through all that crap to find it. But the more specific you are, the quicker the response. I’m not a complete noob in jQuery, but I didn’t know that it would compound that much. Now that I do, I will be WAAAAY more descriptive with my coding. If that interests you, I suggest reading the full article. If all you do is read my post here, then I think the above alone, will help your coding practices and the performance of your web pages.

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Posted in Javascript | 2 Comments »

Ruby and Sass….help me?

April 28th, 2010

So I read a few articles lately, and I’ve seen this stuff before, but now I am really interested. Anyone out there wanna comment on Ruby? The syntax seems easy enough to learn, and I have heard it can be used to create things very quickly. I have also heard by some IT people I know that though it can be quick to create, which is good for prototyping, but hard to change. I’m looking for the run down on why I would want to look at Ruby. And is Rails the same thing? Help coders!

I’m interested in it because of Sass and what you can do with CSS. Here are just some examples I’ve seen with what you can do with Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets).

Variables:

!blue = #3bbfce
 
.content_navigation
  border-color = !blue

And this looks just plain awesome:

.highlight {
  border: 1px #666666 solid;
}
.moreHighlight {
  @extend .highlight;
  background-color: #ff0000;
}

From what I’ve read, this means that anything with the style of moreHighlight also gets the styles of highlight. There are other things like Mixins and such that look bad ass as well.

What I’m curious about though, is it looks like it is compiled. Does this mean I have to do something every time I make a change to the file? Meaning re-compile it? Again, help me out!

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Posted in CSS, Web Development | 2 Comments »

jQuery bind() and namespacing…oh, I get it!

April 27th, 2010

Sorry its been a few days since I made my last post, but a lot got in the way. Anyway, I have been reading this book: Learning jQuery 1.3 (I know 1.4 is out, but the book isn’t yet, so shush!). Its not meant for someone who doesn’t know anything about javascript. You at least need to know the basic syntax of jQuery to be able to get through it, and I’ll write a review of the book when I’m done. So far though, only 60 pages in, I have learned a lot.

In this case, it was the bind() method. I didn’t get what the purpose was, and I didn’t really look that hard. Why is that? Well, because I didn’t need to. The click() event apparently already has the bind method kind of built in. BUT…without using the bind() method, you can’t actually UNbind the event from something.

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Posted in Javascript | 3 Comments »

Divititis….beware, its catchy!

April 20th, 2010

I’m sure you have heard someone either say or write about “divititis.” If not, it is referring to someone who over uses the ‘div’ tag. If someone with this terrible disease were to, say…design a navigation, they would do something like this:

<div id="container">
    <div id="navigationContainer">
        <div id="navList">
            <ul>
                <li>Nav item 1</li>
                <li>Nav item 2</li>
                <li>Nav item 3</li>
                <li>Nav item 4</li>
            </ul>
       </div>
    </div>
</div>

In most cases though, you could just have the first container and the ul. You can position any block level element, such as the ul, just as you would a div. By doing so, you would eliminate unnecessary code, making it cleaner as well as easier to read and figure out what is going on. Now of course, there are going to be times where you need extra container-y things to do some graphic awesomeness, because the multiple background CSS3 styling isn’t supported across the board. I get that, but I would bet a majority of the time, if you looked at your code, you could strip some of the crap out.

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Posted in CSS, Web Development | 2 Comments »

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