June 5, 2013 in Learn
Mini-Icon Settings Menu with the jQuery Toolbar Plugin
Some dynamic user profile layouts have been implementing more complicated JavaScript features. Notably the dropdown settings menu has been a staple of social networking websites. This is a great method for allowing easy access to updating the user profile, or…
May 22, 2013 in Learn
Developing over the YouTube API with JSON
The process to understand API development is generally complicated but should become easier with practice. Social networks like Twitter and YouTube offer XML/RSS/JSON feeds without the requirement of an API key. However, other smaller networking websites like Instagram and Etsy…
May 21, 2013 in Learn
Creating Vanity URLs in Rails
A vanity URL is a search engine optimized (SEO) URL. Instead of having a meaningless URL like http://storeofthefuture.com/products/2015 wouldn’t http://storeofthefuture.com/products/hoverboard be better and more meaningful? It’s fairly straightforward to make URLs nicer in Rails. I’ll walk you through the process….
April 30, 2013 in Learn
Sublime Text 2 and Login Forms | Treehouse Show Ep 37
In this episode of The Treehouse Show, Nick Pettit (@nickrp) and Jason Seifer (@jseifer) talk about Sublime Text 2 and Login Forms. Here are the links for the week: Login and Registration Form with HTML5 and CSS3 | Codrops http://tympanus.net/codrops/2012/03/27/login-and-registration-form-with-html5-and-css3/…
April 15, 2013 in Learn
Extending Placeholder Selectors with Sass
I recently wrote an article on creating a themable button set with Sass where I used a mixin to define all base styles, then a color value was passed as an argument when included in each theme. Example: @mixin btn-theme($btn-color)…
April 10, 2013 in Learn
Best jQuery Date Picker Plugins for Input Fields
When building a web form you need to consider a number of factors for your particular application. Many developers will need to handle special data such as the user’s birthday, invoice date, or subscription trial period. These examples could all…
April 4, 2013 in Learn
Most Helpful Webapps & Resources for Building Modern Websites
There is a large number of online resources for developers looking to make better websites. These are all free tools for anybody to use, and they provide an exceptional push forward in quality. Designers have been striving towards a better…
April 1, 2013 in Learn
Accessing the Device Camera with getUserMedia
One of the funnest technologies to come to web browsers in the last couple years is the ability to access the webcam and microphone without the need for a third party plugin. When you combine these native media streams with…
March 26, 2013 in Learn
Dynamic jQuery Image Avatar Cropping Effect
I can still remember the old digg.com user profiles with dynamic avatar cropping via JavaScript. Their user interface was clean, easy to use, displayed a sample before you cropped, and would auto-update as you changed the selection box. I have…
March 18, 2013 in Learn
Writing Your Own jQuery Plugins
jQuery is great. It’s cross-browser, easy to learn, and makes adding interactivity to your website a breeze. It also comes with plenty of plugins to do almost whatever you need it to do. But what if you can’t find just…
February 28, 2013 in Learn
Creating Vanity URLs in PHP and MySQL: Query String Variables
Vanity URLs can be extremely useful, especially in offline marketing materials. I covered two techniques for creating vanity URLs in PHP in earlier posts: using a subfolder with a header redirect and using rewrite rules in Apache. After publishing those two posts, someone…
February 21, 2013 in Learn
Adding Motion into Web Design with Animate.css
Lots of frontend web developers have been getting interested in dynamic interfaces using motion effects. This is all too common with many advancements within popular JavaScript libraries. But there has also been a lot of interest in CSS3 animated effects….