December 23, 2013 in Learn
Building Multi-Touch Web Applications
With mobile web browsing now accounting for 15% of all global internet traffic building web applications targeted at mobile has become more important than ever. Building for mobile is very different to creating web applications targeted at the desktop environment….
December 13, 2013 in Learn
Challenges & Solutions for Your Responsive Navigation
One of the biggest hurdles when creating a responsive website is implementing the navigation – hands down. Not just from a design standpoint, but from a content and development standpoint as well. Debatably the most important element on the page,…
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 9, 2013 in Learn
Improving Code Quality with JSHint
JSHint is a tool that can help you to write more reliable and consistent JavaScript code. The tool works by checking your code for a number of common errors. If you’ve ever spent half an hour trying to debug your…
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 19, 2013 in Learn
Solutions for Well-Designed Comments & Discussion Areas
Not every website requires a type of user discussion. Handling comments on a popular site becomes a chore when sifting through spam and cleaning up garbage. Yet it also provides a way for readers to communicate their thoughts on a…
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 12, 2013 in Learn
Beginner’s Guide to Ajax Development with PHP
The common use of Ajax in web development has created a dynamic yet fluid Internet. Designers often build mockups which incorporate Ajax-based elements such as lazy loaders, tabbed widgets, and other similar page elements. In this tutorial I want to…
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…