December 12, 2013 in Learn
An Introduction to Source Maps
One of the easiest performance wins you can gain for your website is to combine and compress your JavaScript and CSS files. But what happens when you need to debug the code within those compressed files? It can be a…
December 6, 2013 in Community
An Interview with Hampton Catlin
Hampton Catlin is widely known for being the creator of Sass and Haml. He’s also the author of “The Pragmatic Guide to Sass,” built the mobile version of Wikipedia, Dictionary! for iPhone, and founded the libsass project. I recently interviewed Hampton…
December 2, 2013 in Learn
Which Text Editor Should I Use?
One of the most common questions I’m asked by Treehouse students is, “Which text editor should I use?” That’s a really great question with no simple answer. However, I can understand why it’s confusing. Wikipedia’s comparison of text editors is ridiculously…
November 26, 2013 in Learn
Getting Started with Stylus
Within the web development community, we hear a lot about two popular CSS preprocessor: Sass and LESS. You don’t often, however, hear about the third big preprocessor: Stylus. When it came to redesigning the Mozilla Developer Network, I chose Stylus…
November 25, 2013 in Learn
5 Great Hidden Features in the Chrome DevTools
The Chrome DevTools is a set of panels built into the Google Chrome browser that help web developers inspect code. You can access the DevTools using shortcut keys (Ctrl+Shift+i on Windows and CMD+Option+i on Mac) or by right clicking anywhere…
November 15, 2013 in Learn
Efficient Animations with requestAnimationFrame
If you are using animations in your web apps you’ll want to make sure that they run smoothly. The easiest way of doing this is to use requestAnimationFrame (sometimes referred to as rAF), a method that makes creating smooth animations…
November 11, 2013 in Learn
Scalable Web Design
I can remember a time when pretty much everyone designed websites for an 800×600 screen resolution, but (thankfully) those days are long gone. Smart watches and 4k displays are pushing resolutions at both ends of the spectrum, and even more…
November 1, 2013 in Learn
Native Rich-Text Editing with the contenteditable Attribute
One of the lesser-known HTML attributes is contenteditable. This attribute allows you to turn a standard read-only HTML element into an interactive, rich-text editor. When Tim Berners-Lee built the first web browser in 1990, he created modes for both browsing…
October 30, 2013 in Learn
Code a Simple Github API Webapp using jQuery & Ajax
The online development tool Github has been around for a few years now. It provides online Git repository hosting for projects written in any common programming language. Over time their online API has gone through a few changes with the…
October 28, 2013 in Learn
There’s more than one way to mockup a website.
You’ve probably seen PSD to HTML advertisements around the web. If you type “PSD to HTML” into your favorite search engine, you’ll find lots of companies that will turn your Photoshop mockup into code. You’ll also find innumerable tutorials that demonstrate…
October 25, 2013 in Learn
Building a Synthesizer with the Web Audio API
One of the coolest APIs to hit the web in recent years is the Web Audio API. This allows you to create, load and manipulate audio directly in the browser; as well as perform a whole load of other functions…
October 24, 2013 in Community
Teacher Spotlight: Ben Jakuben
It’s time for another issue of the Teacher Spotlight, where we interview one of the Treehouse Teachers so you can get to know them a little better offscreen, and enjoy a sneak peek into their story, their inspirations and what…