David Walsh World Tour (Guest Blog Posts)

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I've been getting around lately and I wanted to share with you some blog posts that I've published on other sites!

The Mozilla Developer Network has a New Face

I've been working on the MDN front-end redesign over the last four months.  It was a massive undertaking for a number of reasons:  it's a wiki-based community site, new features needed to be added on both the server and client sides, we needed to support a beta mode so we essentially were maintaining two sites concurrently, and the usual feedback and communication issues that come with those other factors.  In this post, I provide the technical details of the MDN redesign.  This is also my debut on the prestigious Mozilla Hacks blog.

Getting Started with Stylus

Speaking of the MDN redesign and debuts, I wrote my first guest post for the Treehouse blog, detailing how to use Stylus, the CSS preprocessor I used for the new MDN.  Stylus is an excellent, excellent preprocessor that doesn't get enough credit, so even if you prefer Sass or LESS, check out this post -- you may learn something!  Don't forget you can start learning for free! ;)

Readying Your Site for RTL

My experience with the MDN redesign taught me a whole lot about CSS, browser rendering, and the need for flexibility in design.  Even if your sites don't require RTL support, this post is a great intro to RTL support.  I promise you'll learn a few things from this post!

An Interview with JavaScript Legend Kyle Simpson

Throughout my career as a developer and blogger, I've had the privilege of meeting or making acquaintances with many super talented software engineers.  Toward the top of the list is Kyle Simpson, father of JavaScript loaders and all around JS badass.  I asked him about JavaScript, HTML5, and his tips for how you can become a legend like him.  Don't miss this!

6 Tips for Creating AJAX-Heavy Websites

This blog is AJAX-heavy and I learned a lot in getting there.  This post details how I made site maintenance infinitely easier with event delegation, JavaScript loaders, and a variety of other techniques.  If you want to optimize your sites with XHR, check out this post!

Whew, I've been all over the place.  I hope you enjoy these posts and look forward to more!

Recent Features

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    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

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    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

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    HTML5’s window.postMessage API

    One of the little known HTML5 APIs is the window.postMessage API.  window.postMessage allows for sending data messages between two windows/frames across domains.  Essentially window.postMessage acts as cross-domain AJAX without the server shims. Let's take a look at how window.postMessage works and how you...

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    Dynamic Waveform Visualizations with wavesurfer.js

    Waveform images are an awesome addition to boring audio widgets.  They can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing, allowing users to navigate audio visually.  I recently found wavesurfer.js, an amazing waveform image utility that uses to Web Audio API to create super customizable...

Discussion

  1. Loupax

    In the title of the post the three dots seem to be a single character that causes the font to break in Chrome 31.0.1650.63 m. Replacing the character with three separate dots in the element inspector makes the font to render normally, and reverting it brakes it again.

    Nothing to do with the post but I found it interesting!

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