Javascript Enlightenment

Independent publishing and web-focused programming are most definitely interesting (for me!); so I’ve finally found a place where the two collide.

[JavaScript Enlightenment] is a self-published, PDF by Cody Lindley, a front-end engineer out of Boise, Idaho. I always worry about self-published books by developers as we don’t always make the best writers. However…

Javascript Hero: Change Computer History Forever

Found a cracking post by one Jason Scott (responsible for crazy and amazing textfiles.org) after discovering DiveIntoHTML5‘s Mark Pilgrim’s disappeared from the face of the Web.

“Besides adding thousands of items to archive.org and uploading terabytes of data (I’m at 28 terabytes of data uploaded since May of this year), I’ve also been working among a bunch of fronts to bring a whole raft of knowledge and history into the browseable, usable world. Trust me, a lot is getting in there. Allow me to both reveal the next step in this grand arch plan, and put a call out for people to help.”

CSS Goings-on

I’m quite willingly taking a lot of inspiration from this month’s issue of net magazine (#220), so forgive me if you’ve already read these.

First of all: Competitions

“In December I took over writing the CSS Gallery section. What does that mean for you my fine Nerdary reader? It means that if you make something new (its got to be new) or your friend makes something new or you see something new that has awesomesauce CSS you should let me know on here or on Twitter and maybe I can use it for an upcoming gallery segment!”

A foray into Widgets…

Yes, the time has finally come for me to do something to do something (slightly) challenging, possibly on my way to building my own theme.

I have a plan to re-widgetise the version of Dark Temptation I re-engineered that is currently in-state at CTSPro.co.uk…

Basically, I’m adding a second sidebar. Although it doesn’t sound too complicated on paper, the recent developments there have only taken longer than expected…

Widgetising a theme (i.e. providing a “zone” for widget-deployment – as Brazell writes) provides decent capability and flexibility for any theme.

Ostensibly providing “the sidebar” for use by any user, can effectively double the amount of content on a given page. If size-restrictions apply to fit that content, this can provide problems with the making too.

In CTSPro’s case, this new widget will only be available on the front-most page of the site, represented by a particular template WordPress can display. This is what may leave me to just hack the content into this code and have done with it…