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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    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

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    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

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    CSS Custom Cursors

    Remember the Web 1.0 days where you had to customize your site in every way possible?  You abused the scrollbars in Internet Explorer, of course, but the most popular external service I can remember was CometCursor.  CometCursor let you create and use loads of custom cursors for...

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    Digg-Style Dynamic Share Widget Using the Dojo Toolkit

    I've always seen Digg as a very progressive website. Digg uses experimental, ajaxified methods for comments and mission-critical functions. One nice touch Digg has added to their website is their hover share widget. Here's how to implement that functionality on your site...

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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