Tag Archives: web development
Must Listen Podcasts From 5by5 Studios
I’ve been sorta quiet around here lately due to a busy summer work schedule, a book project I’m working on (more on that later!), and attempting to get outside with whatever free time I have.
Something else that’s been filling my time are the great lineup of shows and interviews over at 5by5 Studios. Long time web geek Dan Benjamin has pulled together some excellent cohosts and coverage of the tech business, web development, MongoDB, general geekery and even UFOs.
So while I’m not pushing much content out there head over there to fill your brain. And if you like what you find you can become a member and get a cool t-shirt like I did.
This entry was posted in geek, web and tagged dan benjamin, interviews, podcasts, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
Fill Your Apple iPad With Books From SitePoint
Sitepoint has two new offers that will help fill your shiny new Apple iPad [or Kindle or other Nook] with some great titles covering web design, web development and programming and business.
5-For-1 Deal
For the low price of 1 digital book [$29.95USD] you can get 4 more free. The sale ends April 16 so head on over and check the titles. Unless specified, a purchase gives you access to the book in PDF, ePub and MOBI formatted downloads. They’ve created some common bundles based on themes but you can select from more then 30 available titles. Check out the sale and place your order.
Already Purchased? Download the new format FREE
It must have been from a past sale, but I had a few old PDF versions of SitePoint books on my harddrive. I had tried converting them to ePub myself and the results were ‘just ok’. The folks at SitePoint were smart enough to anticipate the desire to do this and kind enough to allow you to log into their site and download the alternate formats for digital books you already have purchased. An informative blog post with all the details.
Some Suggested Titles
I always hit a sale and get overwhelmed with options not knowing what to pick. Having not read all 5 titles I bought in the day since I bought them I don’t want to go so far as recommending something blindly, but here’s my thinking. It’s hard to go wrong with books by Derek Featherstone and Jina Bolton, or Elliot Jay Stocks or Rachel Andrew. I grabbed a title like jQuery: Novice To Ninja just to see how it was written. But there are some books covering novice, server side development or business related topics as well.
This entry was posted in web and tagged books, digital editions, epub, free, ipad, kindle, Nook, pdf, sale, sitepoint, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
CSS3 Box Shadow in Internet Explorer [Blur-Shadow]
For a recent project I was given the task of creating a lightbox style help dialog. The dialog was intended to highlight content of an odd or unknown size in addition to the more controlled information box. Essentially a figure in the shape of 2 adjacent rectangles of variable sizes that needed to be highlighted. The backbreaker — the 8 sided popup needed a large, opaque & diffuse drop shadow to make it stand out off the content.
This was the perfect use case for CSS box-shadow, but its also a public facing promotional site that for good reasons couldn’t just thumb its nose atMicrosoft Internet Explorer. The value proposition for any new CSS property – to make things like shadows and gradients easy to develop and manage with one rule replacing old complex solutions – is lost if you still have to code for that old complex solution juggling multiple PNG images and layering in added markup. Still, that work sounded painful to write for IE6, IE7 & IE8 as well as Firefox, Safari and Chrome so I started looking for an alternative in the proprietary MS filters which are supported in Internet Explorer 5.5 and up.
This entry was posted in project52, web and tagged blur, box-shadow, css, drop shadow, ie filters, msie, p52, tutorial, web design, web development. Bookmark the permalink.
Minimized HTML5 Attributes, Selectors & jQuery
After working with some HTML5 web forms attributes on a small project I have come to the conclusion that for now it is best to…
Use <input required="required"> not <input required>
Some backstory — A few weeks back I was working on a small non-public web site heavy on forms and thought it would be a good fit as an HTML5 test case. For a variety of technical reasons [input formatting in particular] I didn’t go whole hog into it using all the various input type attributes, but did use the required attribute as a hook for JavaScript based form validation and styling. What I found was that generally there was adequate support for styling and selecting based on this new, and unknown to many browsers, required attribute — Yay! we can use this stuff today! However, there were a few browser CSS selector and jQuery 1.3.2 quirks that lead me to the conclusion that it is safest to use the expanded form of the required attribute and not the minimized or shorter form as HTML5 allows. This gives you the most solid and flexible options when choosing selectors in CSS or jQuery code.
This entry was posted in web and tagged best practices, browser testing, cross browser, CSS3, html5, jQuery, minimized attributes, required, web development, web forms, web standards. Bookmark the permalink.
Wrap Up: Standards-Next NYC
On Friday Nov. 20th, ending a wall to wall week of conferences and general geeking out about web technologies I had the pleasure of both attending and speaking at Standards-Next at the Time-Life building in Manhattan. Industry big shots HÃ¥kon Wium Lie [inventor of CSS! OMG!], Molly Holzschlag, Andy Budd and Pete LePage of Microsoft [sans flak jacket] guided an enthusiastic audience through the tools we’ll be using to build web sites over the next few years.
This entry was posted in web and tagged CSS3, event, html5, IE8, IE9, presentation, standardsnext, web development, web standards. Bookmark the permalink.
