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Weekend Links – MooTools Fancy Upload, 60 Second Tech, jSize, CSS Pull Quotes, PHP First Language

By David Walsh on May 3, 2008

MooTools Fancy Upload

Moo developer Harald Kirschner gave Fancy Upload a face-lift for MooTools 1.2. If you haven't seen Fancy Upload before, please check this out!

http://digitarald.de/project/fancyupload/

Sixty Second Tech

I met Cal Evans through my time as a PHP Zone Leader. He's a really bright guy and his newest podcast show aims to share his knowledge with people that aren't so techy.

http://www.sixtysecondtech.com/

jSize 1.0 - A Window Slider/Resizer Wonder for jQuery

This jQuery gem allows for you to use a slider to change the size of columns within the structure of a website. Cool!

http://www.gimiti.com/kltan/wordpress/?p=27

Better Pull Quotes

CSS-Tricks shows you show to avoid duplicating content to create pull quotes by using a little bit of jQuery goodness.

http://css-tricks.com/better-pull-quotes/

Is PHP a Good First Language?

This article outlines why PHP is a good first server-side language to learn. While I love PHP, I think Java is a better first language to learn. It's much more strict, which I think a developer needs to know first -- then be amazed at how PHP is much easier.

http://codeutopia.net/blog/2008/05/01/is-php-a-good-first-language/

Recent Features

By David WalshSeptember 19, 2011
Introducing MooTools Templated
One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...
By David WalshMarch 11, 2013
An Interview with Eric Meyer
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshMay 13, 2010
Create Twitter-Style Buttons with the Dojo Toolkit
I love that JavaScript toolkits make enhancing web pages incredibly easy. Today I'll cover an effect that I've already coded with MooTools: creating a Twitter-style animated "Sign In" button. Check out this five minute tutorial so you can take your static...
By David WalshMay 8, 2018
Vertically Centering with Flexbox
Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be. We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

Discussion

Will
In regards to your statement about PHP vs. Java. I would agree, but for different reasons. I think it’s beneficial to know a non-strictly-web language (unless of course you meant JavaScript?) before learning a web language, I would say it would have to be Java though. I learned Java (well, two college semesters worth) before I taught myself PHP, and it made it much easier.
david
@Will: I went the same route — college Java before teaching myself PHP.
Eric Wendelin
Hmm. That’s a tough one about first languages. My first language was HTML for interpreted and Java for compiled languages. If I was teaching, I would teach shell scripting first because it has some simpler but well defined constructs and I pretty much guarantee that you will use it for a LONG time.
Cal Evans
@David,
Thanks for the kind words and the link. :)

=C=