How it’s made: Front-end developers spill the beans
In the spirit of discovery and process, I set out to ask 3 front–end developers to share their procedures when making stuff for the Web. We’ll start with the initial set up of their local development environment and end with deploying the final product. A special thanks to @andyunleash, @zakkain and @ChrisVanPatten for opening up the curtain and sharing their secrets.
Where’s Your Assets?
Damn! I’m hard coding all the project imagery assets within my stylesheets. What if the URL to those image assets change? This is where Compass will come to the rescue.
Custom WordPress Menu
Preface
The following discussion assumes you like to build blank WordPress themes. If you’re using a child theme then this discussion may not be your cup of tea; unless you like to customize stuff and if so, please read on.
In the beginning…
I’d like to take a stroll with you down wp_nav_menu lane. What’s wp_nav_menu? Well, in a nutshell it’s a way to trigger WordPress’ custom menu functionality. You can see this option from your WordPress admin dashboard under Appearance > Menus.
My Web Design and Development Heros
During my daily duties of scouring Twitter, I caught a post from User Agent Man titled “A Developer I Admire – Walter Zorn”. It was tweeted by Paul Irish who posted “Developers We Admire, where he called out to the web development community to blog about the developers they found important and inspirational. After reading both posts I’ve been inspired and feel it’s time to share my experiences with my Heros and also give thanks back for their support.
Twit : “Embed Tweets the Right Way”
I tried … I really, really tried, but I just couldn’t stand reading the Twitter API any longer. The provided widget embedder Twitter has out of the box isn’t quite there to say the least. So I’m probably sure that you know what it’s like when you can’t get what you want –and in my case I made what I wanted; A simple twitter feed to embed within my own personal website that didn’t suck. Let’s take a closer look and see how I did shall we?
Debugging QVGA Remotely Using Opera’s Mobile Emulator
It was a hot summers day and all I could think about was “How the hell do I test for screens with sizes of 220px thru 260px?” Our faithful browsers currently on the market such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari only squeeze down so far and I don’t have a device that small to test with. We need a way to see what small devices look like when no device is within reach and debug them remotely. Now that the belly aching is taken care of, and a few tweets later, we can get started on finding our solution to small screen emulator debugging.
Tracking the Dark Knight; AKA finding a Webkit engineer
Did you ever come across a browser bug in Webkit and wonder how the hell you get it fixed? or how one tracks down the actual engineer whom landed that feature if no progress is in sight? Well I have no idea either, but I can certainly tell you it’s gonna be a fun and bumpy ride so hang on tight. Where we’re going … we don’t need roads