I was looking at the Digg source code the other day and, I’ve gotta say, mega-props to the developer of their javascript. The traditional rule in web development has become, “Put your Javascript at the end of your page.”  That way, all of the DOM objects you might refer to are guaranteed to be present when you start referring to them.  This had ( Read more... )

Metacritic is an interesting website with a pretty stylish layout, but one thing that drives me nuts is the use of Flash for a simple slideshow on the home page. I decided, as an experiment, to try and replace that with one driven by Javascript.

The choice of javascript turned out to be simple: I’d use jQuery. Not only is it easy to write with, ( Read more... )

I had a job interview today, and one of the “challenges” with which I was presented was this: “We own several sites. We would like our user to be able to log into the central site as a subscriber, and then all the other sites will know what permissions that user has.”

The sites are cooperative, so getting content onto each one to support this idea ( Read more... )

Yes, that’s a signal boost.

I’ve only played with Node.js for about 24 hours now, and I’m already deeply impressed with it. Node.js is something of a holy grail: an implementation of server-side (and desktop) Javascript with a modern engine (Google’s V8), in which all I/O is event-handled. You no longer care about multiplexing, spinning off ( Read more... )

So, I just kicked out another edition of Red State Poly, and I’m trying to figure out what, if anything, I should do with it. There are a few things I could do: obviously, I could work hella harder to make it absolutely consistent with all browsers, but now it works with IE6, 7, Firefox and Chromium, so I’m happier with it.

I found a nasty bug in ( Read more... )

It seems like such a stupid thing, but hey, now I know how to use CSS sprites.

Basically, it’s the same idea as a viewport slider: treat your rectangular space as a viewport onto a background image. By using the background-position attribute and the .css() control (in jQuery; there are others in other libraries), you can move the background image ( Read more... )

I spent a solid two hours figuring out how to do this, so I decided to share with the world. Those of you with small monitors (or other strange habits) might have operating system dock (the thing at the bottom or top of the screen that you use to start programs, check the clock, and see what's running away with your CPU and network) set to " ( Read more... )

The correct call for posting to a user’s facebook wall with Python and pyfacebook, after you’ve established both user authentication via FacebookConnect and gotten stream_publish permission, is:

request.facebook.stream.publish ( Read more... )

I have added Restricting a function’s scope to a specific object to the Javascript Framework Phrasebook.
This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

As some of you may have heard, I recently lost my job at Isilon. In that great tradition, I have put up my resume. Have a look, and please comment on the content or presentation of either version:

Kenneth M. Sternberg, Senior Web and User Interface Developer and Designer.

There’s a copy for printing here.
This entry was automatically cross-posted ( Read more... )