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Archive for December, 2009
Giving Elements Cool Effects Using CSS3
By Patrick Lin on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 | Tags: css | 5 Comments »
CSS3 is full of cool new features. For example, last week we talked about CSS3 colors. In this post, I’d like to talk about some other cool features that CSS3 has to offer, and how you can access some of them now.
Easily Combine JavaScript Files With JMerge
By Karthik Viswanathan on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 | Tags: javascript, php | 15 Comments »
Looking back at the 2009 year, it is evident that JavaScript has played a big role in web design. Using libraries such as jQuery and MooTools, one can easily apply advanced effects with ease. Indeed, JavaScript is now present on almost every website.
With the rise of this new beast comes a few issues. The biggest libraries out there aren’t too small in terms of code size. Each one can add significantly to load time even when minified. Another problem resides with extra HTTP requests; each new file is accompanied by an extra request. Ultimately, this once again leads directly to a larger wait for users.
25 Google Wave Invites For Christmas
By Karthik Viswanathan on Friday, December 25th, 2009 | Tags: freebies | 1 Comment »
Merry Christmas! Today is the day to meet up with friends and family to celebrate and rejoice. Of course, you can’t forget about those great presents under the tree!
‘Tis the Season to Give
Because Christmas is all about giving, we wanted to share the love here as well. To thank the readers of Lateral Code, we will be giving away 25 Google Wave invites for free. Entry is simple and we hope many of you will win!
Need more organization? Make a template-focused site! – Part 2
By Karthik Viswanathan on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | Tags: php | No Comments »
When we last left off, our site was equipped with a simple templating system. Of course, the benefits mentioned in part 1 are not yet achieved. That’s why our venture must continue to build the ideal template-focused site.
Issue: DRY Coding
In our main processing file, index.php, you may have noticed that we don’t yet follow the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) coding paradigm. That is, when we make multiple files, parts of the page such as our navigation, sidebar, header, and footer remain constant, but our pages reuse code. For example, consider the following unordered list navigation:
<ul>
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
<li><a href="/portfolio">Portfolio</a></li>
<li><a href="/gallery">Gallery</a></li>
</ul>Playing Around with CSS3 Colors
By Patrick Lin on Monday, December 21st, 2009 | Tags: css | 26 Comments »
Traditionally, people using colors in CSS have dealt with either the hexadecimal format, which looks like this: #ABCDEF or the rgb format, which looks like this: rgb(171,205,239).
CSS3 comes with a few new ways of manipulating colors, such as using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Light) and opacity/alpha-channels. Unfortunately, only Firefox 3+, Opera 10+, Chrome 1.0+ and Safari 3+ and a few derivatives fully support these at the moment, but we make do with what we can, seeing as Internet Explorer doesn’t even start supporting CSS3 elements until Internet Explorer 9.