Jack Franklin - Freelance Web Designer & Developer

So earlier on I tweeted:

Dear @netmag, some of the JavaScript written in this article is terribly ugly & inefficient: http://bit.ly/pmIamb Sad thing to see.

I’ve since been asked to clarify this so this is exactly what I’m doing with this blog post. I’ve touched this subject before with Think Vitamin, and now I’m doing it again, this time with .Net magazine, one of the UK’s leading Web magazines (and abroad too, I believe). The article in question was titled Tripping the DOM fantastic with jQuery and there was one particular code block that really frustrates me, to see such a poor level of code appearing in a national publication:

This is something I’ve been thinking of offering for a while and with the great feedback I received from the people who attended my jQuery session I’ve decided to go for it.

I’ll be offering one hour, one-to-one training sessions on the following: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, CodeIgniter and Git. I’m happy to teach any abilities, so if you’ve never written a line of JavaScript & want to learn how, or if you’re a seasoned jQuery user wanting to learn more about the language behind the library, I can help.

So the other day on Twitter I was wondering about doing a jQuery screencast series and received a few requests from people to do one. This incidentally coincided with being asked to try out the new video chat website Skilio. So, in my ultimate wisdom (or something like that) I decided to run my series not as a screencast but as a live talk.

I love JavaScript. I don’t think it’s really a secret, I mention it enough! Right now it’s a great language to be involved in with people doing great things in it. It’s gone from the hated language (remember DHTML ?) to one that’s used everywhere, no doubt partly down to the influx of great libraries & toolkits, most notably jQuery.

That said, there are still some things that are not great about it. Some of the syntax can be confusing, and the way it handles scope in functions can catch you out sometimes. That’s why recently I’ve not been writing straight JavaScript, but instead CoffeeScript. Just like in my last blog post, I talked about SASS being a CSS pre-compiler, CoffeeScript is a pre-compiler for JavaScript. You write CoffeeScript, it compiles to JavaScript which you can then include in your HTML file like normal.

SASS & LESS have been terms bounced around Twitter for a long time now and as such with my latest project I decided to get in on the act. Both these apps act as a pre-compiler to CSS. You write your code as SASS or LESS (which is very similar to CSS with a few advantages which I’ll explain shortly) and then it gets compiled into “regular” CSS to be used on your website.

So tomorrow I fly home after 2 weeks spent on the Kainos App Camp learning how to develop applications for iPhone & iPad with XCode & Objective C and I thought it only right to blog briefly about it.

The iPad is something I largely consider to have really helped me in more ways than one, and in this post I attempt to explain why.

So earlier on I tweeted this:

"If I went to a developer position interview and started getting asked loads of coding questions, I'd be annoyed."

And immediately got a bit of a barrage (the good kind) directed at me for saying so. I think on Twitter the 140 characters can be difficult to really get a point across and as such I thought I'd write this post instead.

This entire blog post started out as a comment I was writing on the blog post of Rachel Shillcock discussing if we should be using HTML5 & CSS3 now. You can find that blog post here.

The comment I wrote turned into a half rant half essay affair, so I tidied up my thoughts and collated them together into this very blog post that you are reading here.

A couple of days ago @LauraKalbag asked on Twitter how to split a list into two parts. For example, take a <ul> with 9 items in, and split it into a list of 5 items & another of 4 items. When she asked this I immediately began thinking of a solution in my head (anything to stop me having to revise!) and today I thought I would post up what I came up with.

Another very quick post today talking about reversing variables.

When Dave Kelly invited me to the offices of Storm for a weekend of hacking, with free alcohol & pizza, I couldn't refuse, and took him up immediately on the offer. I've just returned from the weekend, and I thought I would blog about it.

So Keir on Twitter today posed me an interesting question. He asked: "Any idea how to access multiple parameters in 'rel' attribute with jQuery? e.g. rel="param1=value1;param2=value2;". As soon as he asked, I knew I had to try it. So I did, and wrote a blog post on it.

I was hoping to write a blog post about how brilliant Think Vitamin is, as I do believe it to be a hugely fantastic resource for both people with no experience and those who work on the web day by day. However, I've found one video which left me wanting, so decided to write my post on that. Here's a little back story to start.

So with the offer of getting a month of free Think Vitamin membership, I jumped onboard. For those who don't know, Think Vitamin is a web tutorial site run by the fine folks at Carsonified, and I signed up expecting something of real quality. While their video library is very large, with a huge range of subjects, I found one which left me, as a developer who primarily does JavaScript, a little dissappointed. Just to be clear, I still think the idea is amazing, and this is by no means a personal attack at Carsonified or the person who made this video, it just dissappoints me that the quality of code at the end of this particular video wasn't up to scratch, in my opinion.

I noticed recently I was getting a lot of hits to the URL jackfranklin.co.uk/jquote, which once housed a small jQuery plugin I wrote, but is now gone. It turns out a few well read blogs had included it in round ups. jQuote will always be remembered by me, it was my first ever open source release, and was back when I was still very much a novice with jQuery. 

I've always been one for trying different code editors. Over the years I must have tried every one under the sun. So a few months a go when a post on nettuts mentioned Vim, I decided to humour my geek curiosity and have a go. This post is about my experiences so far.

The difference between the two operators is a subtle but very important one. Hopefully this post clears it up.

This is something which I used to struggle with when I got into programming. The different between i++ and ++i. I would always use the wrong one. It's actually pretty simple, but for me it took a real life example to figure it out. So I've created one today in the hope at least 1 person will benefit. It's written in JavaScript, but ++i and i++ work the same in pretty much all "mainstream" languages I've come across.