Posts Tagged ‘webdev’
February 10th, 2010
Nicholas Zakas is a Javascript guru and principle front-end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage. Zakas just announced his new book High Performance JavaScript, which you should order today.
Zakas is pretty much the man when it comes to Javascript performance, and in June he gave a Google Tech Talk entitled Speed Up Your Javascript.
While Javascript optimization is by no means black-and-white, here’s a list of 10 tips from Nicholas’ talk that will help you write Javascript that really flies.
1. Define local variables
When a variable is referenced, Javascript hunts it down by looping through the different members of the scope chain. This scope chain is the set of variables available within the current scope, and across all major browsers it has at least two items: a set of local variables and a set of global variables.
Simply put, the deeper the engine has to dig into this … Read more…
Tags: 10 tips, best practices, DOM, front-end, javascript, jQuery, loops, optimization, performance, scope, webdev
Posted in 10 Javascript Performance Tips, javascript | 4 Comments
December 22nd, 2009
In Javascript it often makes sense to attach a stylesheet rather than style a bunch of individual attributes. Appending a stylesheet to the DOM has a number of advantages:
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Stylesheets can be easier to work with than Javascript—it’s just more natural to use CSS syntax for styling.
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It’s nice to avoid the cross-browser headaches associated with Javascript styling. Compare CSS’s simple float: left to Javascript’s style.styleFloat = ‘left’ and style.cssFloat = ‘left’.
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Appending a stylesheet is better for performance when styling 15 or more elements.
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CSS allows you to leverage pseudo-classes and define styles with the simple a:hover selector instead of both onmouseover and onmouseout event listeners.
There are a couple ways to append a stylesheet. Although it’s usually best to attach an external stylesheet, there are times when you need to build a stylesheet on the fly with Javascript. Let’s walk through the code we’ll need to append … Read more…
Tags: append, best practices, cross-browser, CSS, DOM, front-end, javascript, on-the-fly, unobtrusive, web standards, webdev
Posted in front-end | 1 Comment →
December 8th, 2009
TranslateThis is a new Javascript widget that provides 52 languages of translation by leveraging the Google Language API.
Installing TranslateThis couldn’t be easier—simply copy and paste the widget code anywhere on your website, you don’t have to upload any files or change any settings.
Besides being easy to use, TranslateThis also provides many attractive features for developers. First off, requests to the Language API run in Javascript, so the translation is pretty fast. Additionally, the script is lightweight, weighing in at just over 11kb with another 7kb of imagery. And since it doesn’t depend on any Javascript library, TranslateThis can be implemented on any website without additional overhead. Finally, TranslateThis has been tested in all modern browsers and its user interface is designed to be straightforward and seamless.
Get your own TranslateThis Widget
Read the TranslateThis Documentation
What can you customize in TranslateThis?
Tags: AJAX, analytics, cross-browser, customization, downloads, front-end, javascript, performance, plugins, translation, web design, webdev, widgets
Posted in front-end, webdev | No comments
November 19th, 2009
There were a lot of good speakers at today’s jQuery Summit, but Paul Irish’s talk on jQuery Anti-Patterns for Performance & Compression was my stand-out favorite. Covering a number of advanced jQuery performance optimization techniques, this speech put my knowledge of jQuery optimization to shame.
Before Paul’s talk my understanding of jQuery performance tuning was fairly simplistic:
- Optimize selectors to descend from an id if possible.
- Use tag names when selecting classes and don’t use an excessive number of selectors.
- Define variables instead of selecting the same object repeatedly.
- Optimize your code replacing repetition with object oriented functions.
But the information Paul presented blew all that out of the water. Here are 10 jQuery performance rules I gathered from his presentation:
1. Optimize selectors for Sizzle’s ‘right to left’ model
As of version 1.3, jQuery has been using the Sizzle Javascript Selector Library which works a bit differently from the … Read more…
Tags: front-end, javascript, jQuery, performance, selectors, webdev
Posted in webdev | 11 Comments
August 12th, 2009
My favorite thing about web development is the wide variety of skills it uses. Being a good developer means staying on your toes and always learning, because there are so many important skills and these are constantly changing.
Here’s a checklist of 10 skills that are some of the most important for good web developers to have. These focus a bit on front-end skills, but they apply to all developers:
(more…)
Tags: apache, back-end, best practices, checklists, cross-browser, cyber law, debugging, education, front-end, image processing, javascript, optimization, regex, SEO, version control, web standards, webdev
Posted in webdev | 7 Comments
July 13th, 2009
I’m happy to announce the release of QuickFlip 2, a major reworking of the jQuery plugin that flips any piece of HTML markup over like a card. The new version is faster and even easier to use—simply call the flip animation through a jQuery selector and the QuickFlip will flip the front panel to show its back. The flip effect is similar to the UI animation on the iPhone
Download QuickFlip 2 for jQuery
Read the QuickFlip documentation
QuickFlip works by using an animation shortcut that is barely noticeable when flipped quickly (hence the name). This shortcut improves performance while allowing the flip effect to work smoothly with any piece of markup regardless of images, backgrounds or CSS.
It provides an attractive alternative to other slower and more resource heavy Flash and jQuery flip animations. However if you want a smoother option with … Read more…
Tags: animation, front-end, javascript, jQuery, performance, plugins, UI, web design, web2.0, webdev
Posted in webdev | 58 Comments
June 2nd, 2009
Scrolling Parallax is a new jQuery plugin that binds a parallax effect to the scrollbars and mouse wheel. This allows a background image or anything else to scroll at a different pace than the web page when a user scrolls around. The parallax effect that results is an easy way to create an illusion of depth on your website.
Basic use of the Scrolling Parallax plugin is extremely easy. Simply pass the path to an image, and the plugin takes the image and stretches it to the window width and 150% of the height. The extra 50% of the height is scrolled down along with the document, smoothly reaching the end at the same time as the page.
The Scrolling Parallax plugin is also very versatile. There are a wide variety of options including scrolling faster, slower, looping and reversing the animation and tiling the … Read more…
Tags: animation, downloads, front-end, javascript, jQuery, open source, parallax, performance, plugins, web design, webdev
Posted in webdev | 12 Comments
May 7th, 2009
Contact-Pop is a jQuery plugin that makes contact forms with grayed out overlays incredibly easy. The basic script grabs any links that point to your contact page and flags them for the Contact-Pop popup. When these links are clicked, Contact-Pop grays out the page and pulls in the contact form using AJAX. That means that with just a few lines of code, you can convert your site to use Contact-Pop’s form and overlay rather than your current contact page.
While there are a lot of options for producing grayed out overlays in jQuery, Contact-Pop provides a more robust and specialized solution for in-page contact forms. The main advantage is ease of use: simply flag any links to your current contact page by href or jQuery selector, and ContactPop does the rest. Combining this simplicity with a plethora of customizable options, Contact-Pop is a useful plugin for … Read more…
Tags: AJAX, best practices, blog, CSS, customization, forms, front-end, javascript, jQuery, PHP, plugins, unobtrusive, web design, web2.0, webdev
Posted in webdev | 33 Comments
March 24th, 2009
It’s time for developers to stop complaining about web typography. Custom font embedding has been around for years, and it has finally gotten to the point that typography nerds can be equally happy with the fonts on a website as they are with the Photoshop comps. Many of the things that were a total pain to support previously have become a piece of cake. Leading, kerning, and all the major typography buzzwords have been handled for some time. Even drop shadows and Photoshop-style font rasterization options such as ’strong’ and ‘crisp’ are now fully supportable.
So let’s make sure that we don’t become dinosaur developers, and get up on these modern methods of custom font embedding.
In this article we‚Äôll cover all types of font embedding, from older image replacement methods to embedding fonts with Flash, as well as native browser methods and even full Javascript … Read more…
Tags: best practices, cross-browser, CSS, flash, front-end, ImageMagick, javascript, licensing, typography, w3c, web design, web history, webdev
Posted in front-end | 13 Comments
December 30th, 2008
Flipbook is a jQuery plugin that produces a movie effect by running images in quick succession. The concept is similar to something I always did in middle school: doodling in the margins of my notebooks to make short movies. Times have changed and nowadays I use a Javascript object, pulling the images dynamically with jQuery’s AJAX function and a PHP script 
. But don’t worry, it’s just as easy to use as a real flipbook.
The jQuery Flipbook Plugin is built around my jQuery slideshow tutorial. It’s very flexible, providing great options for both new and seasoned developers alike. You can easily make anything from a short film to an image slideshow to a text viewer.
Tags: AJAX, animation, CSS, downloads, front-end, javascript, jQuery, object oriented, PHP, unobtrusive, video, webdev
Posted in webdev | 2 Comments
