Paul Tero is a freelance web developer, living and working in Brighton, England. He has over 20 years experience on a wide range of projects and platforms.
This article is a beginners’ guide to JavaScript syntax and how it is used by jQuery. jQuery is just a JavaScript library that has a special-looking function,
$
, and that encourages the use of
shorthand objects
,
anonymous functions
and
method chaining
. jQuery is not alone — libraries like
YUI
(Yahoo User Interface) do similar things.
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Imagine that you wake up one morning, reach groggily for your laptop and fire it up. You’ve just finished developing a brand new website and last night you were proudly clicking through the product list. The browser window is still open, the Widget 3000 is still sparkling in its AJAXy newness.
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Imagine that you wake up one morning, reach groggily for your laptop and fire it up. You’ve just finished developing a brand new website and last night you were proudly clicking through the product list. The browser window is still open, the Widget 3000 is still sparkling in its AJAXy newness.
Read more…
In the construction industry, a “firewall” is a specially-built wall designed to
stop a fire from spreading between sections
of a building. The term spread to other industries like car manufacturing, and in the late 1980s it made its way into computing.
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This article relies heavily on numbers and aims to provide an understanding of character sets, Unicode, UTF-8 and the various problems that can arise.
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At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the
text-based computer terminals
of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s.
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Many Web companies spend hours and hours
agonizing over the best domain names for their clients
. They try to find a domain name that is relevant and appropriate, sounds professional yet is distinctive, is easy to spell and remember and read over the phone, looks good on business cards and is available as a dot-com.
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Over my programming career, I have made a lot of mistakes in several different languages. In fact, if I write 10 or more lines of code and it works the first time, I’ll get a bit suspicious and test it more rigorously than usual. I would expect to find a syntax error or a bad array reference or a misspelled variable or
something
.
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Imagine that your biggest client calls because they are having trouble retrieving their email. Or they want to know what their best-selling item is right now. Or their most popular blog post. Perhaps their website has suddenly gone down. You can hardly reply, “No problem, I’ll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours.” And yet DNS gets away with it! If you need to move a website or change the way a domain’s email is handled, you’ll be faced with a vague 24 to 48-hour delay.
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Website speed has always been a big issue, and it has become even more important since April 2010, when Google decided to use it in search rankings.
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Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: “Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We’ll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye.” The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by “Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue.” That’s your boss calling the hosting company’s 24 hour “technical support” line. An important
website has gone down
, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned “Linux” on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here’s what to do.
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