In three and a half years, I went from a programmer with very little writing skills (just trying to not forget things I learned) to really being listened to by a wide range of people.

Traffic, Oh! So Much Traffic

Millions of people. I can’t imagine how many football stadiums that would fill up! Sure, all I was doing was pushing the knowledge needle forward for people through open source code, but it really sunk deep into my heart what I was doing…

Quick FYI: this article is a high-level overview of CouchDB features, not a tutorial.

Ok, so what makes me so excited about CouchDB?! CouchDB is a NoSQL, schema-free JSON document storage where JavaScript can access the database directly via HTTP with no middleware required! Let me say that again…

JavaScript can access the database directly…

Society is moving at an unprecedented pace. A year ago I didn’t have the word “Android” in my vocabulary but now I use an Android phone every day. Entrepreneurs of yesterday have to wake up to this new world and realize that the rules have changed. Entrepreneurs suddenly, “cannot find good talent”. Meanwhile, hackers don’t need idea people when they are the idea people…

Increasingly people think I’m rich so this is the first in a series of articles that I’ve drafted to break down my concept of value and wealth to open up a path of discovering what real "rich"ness really is. Even though I am not rich financially (though they think I am), people I’ve talked to who are making millions wonder just how I am able to make moves that are too risky for even them to take…

Halting Open Source for Education

You could go as far to say I halted writing open source for the sake of learning to teach (not in a classroom sense, but the broader sense of the term)…

First, I’m going to do a recap of the past. Then I’ll share about what happened this year.

Foreword: Informational Rags to Riches

I grew up in and still live in Minnesota…

The date plugin is a very lightweight plugin that provides a fairly simple API for the things I typically need to do with dates and will need for the new datepicker…

WordPress Saves Intellectual Property of Millions

Millions of websites are self-hosted with WordPress. Along with that hundreds of millions of articles, content and words have been produced on these self-hosted domains on an open source code base…

Signing on Karl Swedberg as Editor

Over the next month, I will be finishing the course with Karl Swedberg as editor. He is the author of the Learning jQuery Book and also the creator of the Learning jQuery blog…

The Key to Productivity, “The Mission”

The first, biggest key to productivity is to define your underlying philosophy of why you do what you do…

What do we organize and share online?

There are a few things that a person shares online…

The project I’m working on at the moment is in Groovy. In order to set JSON on page load, you have to escape either single quotes or double quotes.

var myJSON = ‘this is the cat\’s first day in Marc\’s house’; // JavaScript string

With groovy, you can cast something as JSON and set it to the view pretty easily…

Normal if statements

Nothing special here, just a normal if statement.

foo = "bar";
if ( foo == "bar" ) {
foo = "something";
} else {
foo = "somethingElse";
}

If statements can be written without curly brackets

foo = "bar";
if ( foo == "bar")
foo = "something";
else
foo = "somethingElse";

What people don’t like about this is if you need to do another action inside the if statement, then you have to manually go back and wrap it in curly brackets…

$.get(url, data, function, "html/json/xml..");
$.post(url, data, function, "html/json/xml..");
$.ajax({
…
dataType: "html/json/xml.."
});

Now, you can have the server respond with the mime type like application/json and jQuery will automatically switch the dataType for you! This makes more sense because the server is the one sending the response, jQuery is only handling it…

Want to download the presentation? PDF of jQuery Essentials

…

HTML String, or jQuery Object?

The first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not it makes sense to build out HTML as jQuery objects, or if you require the speed of building strings…

When I started learning Ruby, managing gems was a huge problem to the point I would make fun of it. Now I use RVM which helps you install multiple versions of ruby on one computer. Not only does it do that, but it makes gem management a breeze as well! Beyond RVM, Rails 3 provides us with bundler, which allows you to install gems based on a list of dependancies automatically. Very slick…