An engineer’s approach to optimizing websites. Nice to see a formulated plan, that includes how to get managerial buy-in!
Then measure it to prove your point!
A nice high-level waterfall interpretation. Get familiar with what each line, color, and oddity means, and how to get around it.
I know it seems like I have a DevTools article from Addy Osmani every issue, but this is a nice primer, covering the basics and offering a few how-tos for jank-free user experienes.
One of the things I love most about my industry is how it is constantly changing, with new best practices popping up to improve what we do. Here is a snapshot of some of the latest, where we learn that maybe not all CSS and JS should be externally-linked, and maybe not all assets need tobe delivered right away. Some good stuff here.
Not because I’m such an iOS7 fanboy, but these checkbox replacements are pretty slick!
How well do you know JS Array?
From Marc Grabanski comes his year-end summary of talks, presentations, etc. I know slide decks without the audio aren’t usually very useful, but there are links to demos that could be.
And from Zach Leatherman comes a whole slew of great tips, tricks, notes, and presentations from 2013.
There is a new agreement in the EU to standardize a single device charger for all devices. About time!
But until that happens, gets to market, and becomes a global standard, there is the ThingCharger. Freaking awesome!
Keeping going with the cool shit category, how about battery-free, contact-free, bicycle lights?? Yeah, awesome!
And how about a heads-up navigation for your bike??? Yeah, awesome too!!
Has cloud-coding finally come of age? Koding says yes, and the product seems very impressive! But I am still not a fan of everything being 100% reliant on a data connection. I feel like we still need local dev first…
I frst saw the Typo keyboard a few weeks ago, but lost the article. Seems Blackberry didn’t…
Wow, if I didn’t know what this was, or how delicious it was going to be, I would be scared… ;-)
98-year-old photo negatives discovered in Antarctica. Just wow…
I completely agree with Chris Coyier on this list of words to avoid for educational writing, but I would take it a step further and say they should be removed from our lexicon completely! Of course, obviously these words are clearly just so easy, however, basically everyone knows how to simply write and speak without them. ;-p
I’m still trying to get up-to-speed with Node.js (and JS unit tests, for that matter), so this definitely looks like something worth diving into.
I don’t know very many FEDs that don’t do side projects, either for entertainment or for money, so this could be a pretty useful book!
I also don’t know very many people that would actually need this, but a projector / wifi-hotspot just makes so much sense, I had to share…
I can’t find anything that says specifically whether this course is free or has a fee, but either way, might be worth looking into!
Animated GIFs have certainly made a comeback, but they’re no longer your father’s opening mailbox or “under construction” GIFs. Instead, things like LICEcap are helping us make tiny video-like GIFs. Far smaller, and far easier to implement than video!
Believe me when I say I am no math wizard, so if the giant that is Seb Lee-Delisle (the first person I heard reference physics when talking about JS!) recommends a math tutorial, I’m all in…
And while I tinker in the world of JS nearly everyday of my life, if the giant that is John Resig is going to offer to help me learn JavaScript, I shall sit quickly and listen…
And once you’ve learned JS (and take some other such tutorial on CSS!), you can make über-cool parallax sites, like Exsus Travel site. Nice, brief run-through, but for real fun, chcek the Source, and note how tight it all is, nothing extraneous (even removing the "s for the html class attribute…
We got a quick intro to the Vibration API from SitePoint in the last Today’s Readings issue, so let’s see how it could be used in a web app or game…
I’m really intrigued by the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node), and this polling example continues to intrigue…
Including using Node.js to create desktop apps… Wait, what??
You have to admit, the CSSCV is clever. I like the liberal use of dls… I remember making business cards similar to this once… Anyone remember what those things are??
Okay, couldn’t get through an issue without talking about SVG, so here goes!
- SVG line drawing is just fun to watch!
- And now that we’re all using SVGs all over the damned place, let’s make sure their not adding to the bloated bloatiness that is our web…
- Then go make cool bouncy things with your fancy SVG.
The latest e-commerce site performance run-down from Yotta. It awes me that e-commerce sites that make customers wait 30+ seconds until they can start using their site, are still in business… But huge kudos to the top 3 that managed it in under 3 seconds!
And to help keep us out of that Slowest 20 list, Ariya Hidayat helps us go beyond simple time measurements when testing our JS performance by showing us how to dig into tracing and sampling.
Hopefully this isn’t you… Though, to be fair, this doesn’t look like a site that has been updated in a loooonnnngggg time, just a tragic left-over from a long-forgotten time… I hope.
And finally, one of the more entertaining 404 pages I’ve seen. I found myself just sitting there, waiting for the next line, because I wanted to see what came next… :-)
Happy reading,
Atg