May 2013
1 post
3 tags
Testing Laravel Controllers →
Jeffrey Way is such a prolific writer on the topic of Laravel. I particularly enjoy this excellent article on writing tests for controllers. You should support Jeffrey by signing up for tutsplus and soaking in all his knowledge.
You can also pre-order his book on testing. He’s an excellent instructor.
April 2013
7 posts
Laracasts →
You know what’s great? Laravel. You know why? Because people throw together stuff like Laracasts, a central place for Laravel screencasts.
They don’t make the screencasts there, they just find them so you can click and learn.
Lovely.
3 tags
Interview with Brandon Kelly, creator of Craft
Craft has recently gone into beta and it’s definitely worth a look. Here, we interview one of its creators, Brandon Kelly on the philosophy behind Craft and its technical aspects.
Why does the world need another CMS?
Let’s face it: all of the popular CMS’s out there today are a mess. They’ve been mismanaged, taken in directions the code was never meant to go, warped to...
3 tags
Laravel 4 Update →
Taylor Otwell runs through a bunch of new features he’s added to Laravel 4. I highly recommend you watch this screencast as it shows a lot of cool new toys.
7 tags
Leaflet JS + MapQuest for Maps
I read the A List Apart article: Hack your Maps. It was an interesting scenario that got me thinking about maps.
I’ve really only used Google maps for my mapping needs so today I figured “why not try something new?” and looked into some others. I needed an interactive map, not a static image, so that was one requirement. I looked into a variety of options out there, also read...
Craft CMS Sample Plugin →
Created by the very talented Adrian Macneil, and based on a lot of the samples in the documentation, the Craft sample plugin is a great way to get a look at how Craft plugins are built.
It also is an excellent preview of the Craft API. If you see anything you don’t like make sure to tell the Craft team on their community page.*
Yes, their community page is on Google Plus, but the...
Laravel 4 vs. Symfony 2 →
Laravel creator Taylor Otwell weighs in on what differentiates Laravel 4 from Symfony 2. Both popular frameworks for PHP.
Craft
For the longest time, people have been asking me for a viable alternative to ExpressionEngine. For a very long time, there wasn’t one. I can wholeheartedly recommend Craft from Pixel & Tonic. It has a well thought-out API. It has a strong development team behind it. You should go give it a test drive, because the core is free.
What I love
Universal Fields
One of the biggest gripes when...
March 2013
1 post
Remapping Paste in ST3
I find myself always using “Paste and Indent” in Sublime Text 3. In fact, I use it so much that it really should be the default instead of dumb ol’ “Paste and totally ignore your carefully crafted indention.” Luckily it’s incredibly easy to switch. Simply open up your user Key Bindings under Preferences and paste in the following:
[
{ "keys": ["command+v"],...
February 2013
6 posts
Laracon Talk: Per Your Request
On Friday of last week, I was privileged to speak at the first ever Laracon, the conference for Laravel. It was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to.
I’ve posted my slides up from my talk, which goes through what happen when a user loads index.php. Essentially this is step-by-step code execution, something I’m incredibly fascinated by. Everything is eventually...
Anonymous asked: whats about rails?
Profiling Long Paint Times →
If you’re a front-end developer you owe it to yourself to read, and understand, how your browser paints/renders the DOM to the screen.
Continuous painting, however, may be what finally makes paint times/repaints easy enough to understand that anyone will be able to profile a page for issues.
1 tag
rake document
I’ve never been one for @todo’s or @returns because, frankly, I can never remember the obnoxious syntax required to docblock something. So, it’s no wonder that I love things like docco. Unfortunately, with docco you need a web server or browser to really read through it.
I’ve always wanted a simple way to grab the comments from a source file and turn them into a readable...
Ladies in Tech →
We were on a train, gallivanting through Europe, when fellow Nerdary compatriot Jenn Lukas explained her plan. She had a website she wanted to build. She wanted it built and designed by women, and she wanted it to speak to women’s issues in the tech community.
She was discussing a conference she attended, and how the talks had been passively sexist. It was sexist via ignorance, not...
DocBlockr for Sublime Text 2 →
One of my favorite plugins for Sublime Text 2 (mind you, not the Sublime Text 3 now in beta). This nifty little plugin lets you type /** then does all the documentation lookup for you based on context.
For example, if your method looks like this:
public function awesome(Array $rad){}
and then you type /** above it and hit tab (or whatever you use to expand shortcut snippets). It will turn...
Anonymous asked: Why did you rip off The Nerdery
January 2013
4 posts
Using to Avoid Orphans
Last night I had the pleasure of taking Yesenia Perez-Cruz’s Typography class for Girl Develop It. While I teach the HTML/CSS class for the group, I have never attended one as a student, so it was an awesome pleasure! It was really great to learn more about type.
So taking it back a bit, one thing that came up is what to do about widows/orphans, something I’m sure we’ve all...
:only-child and Breadcrumb Separators
I haven’t really come across too many reasons in my everday work to use the only-child pseudo-class (insert dramatic pause) UNTIL TODAYYYYYYY. So I thought I’d share.
This comes in super handy for breadcrumbs. Often breadcrumbs have a visual separator between the links. Sometimes this is between all list items except the last one. That looks pretty good.
However, when you are only...
WatchFriend of The Nerdary, and Dutch royalty, developer Lodewijk “Low” Schutte has released a wonderful screencast on Building an ExpressionEngine Add-on.
ExpressionEngine is a popular CMS that has established an excellent add-on marketplace, and Low is constantly creating some of the finest add-ons. I’ve been making my way through the screencast and have already stolen learned so...
December 2012
3 posts
jQuery Compatible Libraries for Mobile →
This linked post above is from August, but I found myself reading it today.
So many websites a lot of us are making these days are responsive. Faced with a strictly mobile site, a question arose on whether to stick with jQuery or use an alternative.
This link featured a ton of neat speed tests of jqMobi and Zepto.
I haven’t used http://www.jqmobi.com/ but I’m interested.
...
Anonymous asked: when is L4 likely to launch?
Go to Laracon →
You should go to Laracon. Not solely because Laravel is one of the best things to come out of PHP in years. Nor because of its creator’s charming drawl.
You should go because for the first time in years there is a small chance that The Nerdary (the one that counts) may be assembling. Sure, Mark Huot has yet to commit and Jenn Lukas doesn’t even know that I’m going to try to...
November 2012
6 posts
Code smells in CSS →
This is a tremendous article about CSS bad practices. I have committed every one of these atrocities, and certainly some on this site. While I don’t agree with all assertions (IDs are great weapons if you need them), I love how much I learned about how to think abstractly about CSS.
Admittedly, since I joined Facebook, my CSS has withered down to nothing. It’s time to brush up again...
11 tags
A Look at Responsive Menus: jPanelMenu
A coworker of mine, Anthony Colangelo, recently released jPanelMenu
“jPanelMenu is a jQuery plugin that creates a paneled-style menu (like the type seen in the mobile versions of Facebook and Google, as well as in many native iPhone applications).”
It’s a neat plugin that is sure to cure a few headaches. I do recommend turning the animation off for the sliding menu off to...
Laravel.io →
For those of you interested in Laravel, Laravel.IO is an excellent site run by Shawn McCool. I highly recommend you subscribe to it.
9 tags
My Beefy Adventure with Icon Fonts pt 3: Web...
Web Symbols Typeface
You know what rules about this one? It’s free. So they’ve got a good thing going right away.
Web Symbols has chosen the character mapping for you. This is fine, but worth keeping the page up at all times so you can remember what’s what.
They provide you the font files and the @font-face rules to use in your CSS. So far, very easy.
I’ve only...
My Beefy Adventure with Icon Fonts pt 2: Symbolset
Symbolset
Next up! Symbolset is very pretty. And they have great response time to issues, both on Twitter and in email. That rules so ridiculously hard. As I ran into a couple of issues while using the font.
Symbolset offerse multiple sets. This is great if you want to save money by not buying all of them, but a bit tedious when it comes to implementing more than one set. I dropped in imports...
10 tags
My Beefy Adventure with Icon Fonts pt 1: Pictos
First off, I don’t even eat beef.
Secondly, I think icon fonts are nifty. My relationship with them however, has started off kinda rocky.
CSS Tricks has a great article on using icon fonts semantically, the best you can, as well as an extensive round up of the fonts out there. I’ve had a few personal experiences with three of them recently that I’d like to share over the next...
October 2012
3 posts
Bundles in Laravel 4
I sent Taylor Otwell, lead developer/creator of Laravel, a quick follow-up question about bundles. With Composer being a big part of the next release, the need for bundles disappears. Here’s what Taylor says:
What’s called “bundles” now will be Composer packages in Laravel 4. I will probably encourage people to try to write their bundles in such a way that they can be...
Making Links Magical Again with CSS: re:build 2012
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at re:build 2012 in Indianapolis. I gave a talk on the nifty things people are doing with hovers these days. Slides are here if you’re into that: http://www.slideshare.net/JennLukas/making-links-magical-again-with-css
I thought I’d share with you one example that prompted me to utilize hovers.
One day, I was hanging around watching the movie...
HTML5 Boilerplate Configs: Nginx →
Using nginx and want to know how to configure certain things? Check out this great set of templates from the HTML5 Boilerplate project.
This helped me figure out the best way to handle cross-domain fonts.
September 2012
4 posts
Cure for the Common Code →
Our very talented Jenn Lukas, a bi-annual contributor to this site, went to the dConstruct with a fractured tibia to talk about code education. As with anything JL, it’s well worth your time (except for the other blogs she writes for).
Use PHP 5.4; Here's why (again).
You can now instantiate and use objects immediately.
(new Person)->set('id', 1);
Now that’s lovely.
Use PHP 5.4; Here's why.
There are many reasons to try and use PHP 5.4. This is my favorite.
$array = [
'awesome' => 'thisis',
'yay' => 'finally'
];
That’s right. A terse array syntax. Hurray! I’m fairly certain this cleans up quadrillions of bytes.
Laravel 4
I’ve been giving Laravel a lot of love here and for good reason: it’s a great, accessible framework with great leadership behind it.
It came to my attention that Laravel creator Taylor Otwell and a team of talented programmers are working on the next major release of Laravel, version 4. I shot Taylor an email to see what was coming.
Below is his fantastic response.
Philosphy of...
August 2012
7 posts
ST2: Wrap each line in an element
The ability to wrap each individual line in an HTML element (e.g. <li>) was something I missed from Textmate. However, as with all things Sublime Text 2, there is a solution. Here is how.
Select the lines you want to wrap.
Press CMD + SHIFT + L
Then CTRL + SHIFT + W
Voilà! You now have a nice list.
My Sublime Text 2 Config
I thought it might be neat to share this. Here’s my default user config for Sublime Text 2:
{
"word_wrap": true,
"font_face": "Inconsolata",
"font_size": 14,
"highlight_line": true,
"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
"auto_complete_commit_on_tab": true,
"draw_white_space": "all",
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
"tab_size": 2,
"rulers":...
Create a Blog With Laravel →
Maxoffsky (or Maksim Surguy) has written what every growing framework needs: the build a blog tutorial.
More Laravel Screencasts →
Andrew Perkins has created 10 Laravel screencasts that should help you get on your way.
Laravel: Code Happy →
Continuing with what is becoming a strictly Laravel blog, I would be amiss to not mention the Laravel book. While I haven’t fully read it, I know it comes highly regarded. I’ve purchased a copy and I suggest you do as well.
The book is written by Dayle Reese a web developer and Laravel core team member. You can follow him on twitter here. His website also has a lot of blog posts on...
WatchMatthew Machuga is a developer who has made several great screencasts about building stuff with Laravel.
If you like what you see here you should subscribe to his blog and follow him on twitter.
Laravel
It was a breezy inconsequential day in February, working at the old mill, when I beheld this tweet:
It’s great to see @laravelphp 3.0 live! - laravel.com a fantastic framework, really the only competitor to CI— Jamie Rumbelow (@jamierumbelow) February 22, 2012
I then began to investigate. What is this mysterious framework? After many months of off-again on-again romantic comedy style...
July 2012
2 posts
10 tags
CSS Generated Content and Screen Readers
Some of you might remember this test of assistive technology and generated content from Lucica Ibanescu. In which results showed that of the screen readers tested, not one of them read the content, with perhaps some exceptions with VoiceOver (in the comments).
I’m currently working on coding a design for a news article page. In the design, there are breadcrumbs, the title of the article...
June 2012
5 posts
Live: The O Music Awards →
Hi friends!
For the last 2 months, the http://www.omusicawards.com/ have been the top of both Mark and I’s coding priorities. We did the last interation of their site back in October 11 and the next one is up and going live right now. The Flaming Lips are attepting to break a world record by playing 8 shows in different locations in 24 hours. Mark (and Happy Cog dev, Anthony) are currently...
Sublime Text 2 Love →
Sublime Text 2 is now my primary editor. Kenneth Reitz wrote this excellent list of tips and tricks.
1 tag
Printing Github
If you’re programming in a language that, until recently, is best compared to the wild west you may find yourself trying to print out some markdown files on Github. Unfortunately Github doesn’t have a print style sheet so all their beautiful syntax highlighting, typography, and layout are lost when printing.
So, I put together this quick jQuery snippet you can run in your Web...
Debugging WebSockets with CURL
Because I can’t find any resources online for debugging WebSockets I’m going to add my own voice. To see a bit more detail with CURL you’ll need a few flags, specifically:
$ curl -i -N -H "Connection: Upgrade" -H "Upgrade: websocket" -H "Host: echo.websocket.org" -H "Origin: http://www.websocket.org" http://echo.websocket.org
Those flags say:
Return headers in the output
...
xip.io and Apache ServerAlias
Today I switched around a bunch of my local sites to work with xip.io, which if you haven’t heard, is the new hotness. And, if you’re using Apache or MAMP Pro it’s super simple. Just setup your VirtualHost as follows:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName client.dev
ServerAlias client.*.xip.io
DocumentRoot /Users/you/Sites/client
</VirtualHost>
In MAMP Pro...
May 2012
15 posts
Facebook Open Graph →
I rag on Facebook a lot. I don’t like this or that or the other thing. But their API and, specifically, how it interacts with the Open Graph is really well done. It’s amazingly easy to get a share to display with custom thumbnails and embedded video.
Credit where credit is due. Well done Facebook Developers.
If you haven’t added OG tags to your page consider it. It’s...
