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I started getting “serious” about development because I had a desire never to write lengthy, wandering streams of code again.  It was not for any reason but unadulterated laziness—the kind that so overpowers the better senses as to force a person to spend hours in a chair with the express goal of not spending hours in said chair.  It’s a wild, consuming laziness that seems to know no bounds.

As developers, once we start separating our code into abstract ontological typologies, we make use of the human mind’s phenomenal ability to work with types.  Our code becomes less about jump tables and registers and more about users, email messages and images.  What once was a problem of allocating resources and operations within the computer becomes an abstract, logical problem within a collection of objects.  Like children awe-struck by stories of magicians of old, speaking incantations and pressing their wishes into reality by the power of their mind alone, we become drunk with the sense of awe and possibility.

We *really* dive into things after the jump, so go ahead and hit it.

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Tagged with: code, code recycling, code reuse, css, currying, functions, javascript, libraries, objects, patterns, php, practices, programming concepts, programming techniques, spl

Posted in: Articles, Development

HTML 5 is coming our way. So goes the theory, anyway. (Recent chatter puts widespread adoption by user agents at close to a decade out from now… or more.) It is still a moment that many of us are eagerly anticipating. I remember drooling over my keyboard while reading through the HTML 5 Specifications the first time. We have been stuck with HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 for a long time and it is time to see some changes.

(In fact, HTML 4.01 has presented us with the longest gap in HTML revisions—it’s been 10 years since it was released; HTML 3.2 only lasted about a year, from 1997 to 1998.) There are some great things we have to look forward to that will make life a lot easier for us developers and designers. We’ll take a look at a few of them after the jump.

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Tagged with: attributes, browsers, css, dom, html, html 5, javascript, tags, w3c, websites, xhtml

Posted in: Design, Development, Tech News

The Interweb is a wonderful place to host complex web applications as long as you’re tethered to it by Cat5 and an ISP that has your back (Communism works out in this scenario as well). But that’s not the world we live in, and in all other cases using web applications from mobile platforms can be a new circle of Dante’s Inferno below that ice one.

The trouble with web applications on mobile platforms is two fold. First, displaying data for mobile devices is a problem in and of itself, for which I will say nothing more about in this article. Imagine users with laptops and tablet-PCs. The second and more interesting problem revolves around maintaining state and managing client server interactions in an environment where spotty network coverage and ambient radio noise are totally messing with your stuff.

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Tagged with: ajax, javascript, projects, sessions, state

Posted in: Design, Development, How To

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to quickly and easily use single images and a bit of crafty CSS to create easy image rollovers. You can also use this technique to simplify browser caching of your images by storing multiple images in a single “meta image”, so to speak. (There are some reasons not to do this, though.)

I don’t know if the creators of CSS were thinking of sprites (more on that later) when they thought of the background-position property [Never doubt the range of "what if" thoughts of those who created CSS—Ed] but thanks to many innovative CSS users, we have an excellent way to reduce the load times of our pages. Check it out, after the break.

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Tagged with: background-image, button rollovers, css, javascript, load time, optimization, sprites

Posted in: Design, How To

There are plenty of resources for code snippets and quick-and-dirty ways to accomplish all sorts of things in JavaScript. Back before AJAX achieved any sort of prominence, they were all form validators, alert systems, calculators and the like. Now that AJAX has hit the “Web 2.0″ scene in a big way, (in large part typifying the “Web 2.0″ application interface) more and more users are clamoring for ways to add those cheeky interface elements that they see on Flickr and elsewhere to their own attempts at the web.

We make pretty heavy use of YUI and occasional use of Prototype and Scriptaculous, all various forms of JavaScript frameworks/libraries that save us time and effort by packaging up neat effect calls and components into easily digestible chunks, while making the JS we write sane again.

The script samples here don’t do any of that cool stuff but they provide a quick and dirty starting point with some nice guidance to get in there and start AJAXing your site.

Worth a look, at least, but perhaps only if you have *some* familiarity with JavaScript basics. No? Alright, dive right in. Just be sure to test across browsers.

AjaxDaddy.com via Lifehacker

Tagged with: ajax, ajaxdaddy, frameworks, javascript, prototype, scriptaculous

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Design

Ever since we made the switch from hosting our own mail servers to using Google Apps for Domain, one of the Firefox extensions that I use on a daily basis is Gmail Manager. It allows me to easily view the inboxes for various email accounts that I monitor and gives me the ability to quickly launch any of those accounts into a new tab. The only problem is that the extension author hasn’t made any updates to it since 2007. While this wouldn’t normally be too big of a problem, Google in their infinite wisdom has decided to rename the username and password login inputs.

The result of the name change by Google caused the extension to stop retrieving email and auto-logging me in to the accounts. It wasn’t until I got suspicious of the fact that it didn’t appear that anyone was emailing me for a few hours that I decided to manually log in and investigate. Once I determined that the extension had broken, I went to work trying to track down an updated version or a quick fix to get it back in action. What I found was a forum for the extension with over 100 pages of messages in it.

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Tagged with: extension, firefox, gmail, gmanager, javascript, news

Posted in: Rants