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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    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

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    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

Incredible Demos

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    Simple Image Lazy Load and Fade

    One of the quickest and easiest website performance optimizations is decreasing image loading.  That means a variety of things, including minifying images with tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG, using data URIs and sprites, and lazy loading images.  It's a bit jarring when you're lazy loading images and they just...

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    Create Digg URLs Using PHP

    Digg recently came out with a sweet new feature that allows users to create Tiny Digg URLs which show a Digg banner at the top allowing easy access to vote for the article from the page. While I love visiting Digg every once in a...

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!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!