Hi, my name is Adam. I develop software for the web, run workshops and I really think that
"The Web is the Platform".
14th October 2015
I created a technique for using SVG icons without pain with a simple gulp task. Since HTTP/2 is not widely supported yet, it has always been a pain to use icons on web pages. There are many ways to include icons and all of them have some tradeoffs. This interesting technique shows a way to include SVG-icons in a cross-browser way with using custom elements.
read more26th January 2015
Event delegation is a powerful concept of event handling. If you are using jQuery, you might know it as jQuery.on(). Since I don't use jQuery anymore, I had to write a similar function myself. If you are wondering how the code looks like, read on.
read more1st January 2015
I wish you all a happy new year and much fun and success for 2015! Let's have a quick review of the past 365 days.
read more18th December 2014
In my previous article about webfont loading I showed a technique about how to load webfonts without blocking page rendering and without annoying the users with flickering text on all pageloads. This time I show you an optimized version of the script and provide a solution for WOFF2 support for the newest browsers.
read more20th October 2014
At the Nordic.js 2014 Douglas Crockford was giving a talk about what he considers to be "the good parts" of JavaScript in 2014. He talks about ECMAScript6, what parts of it he could already identify as the new good parts, and of which he thinks, that they are going to be the new bad parts. Read on for my summary or just whatch the video.
read more16th October 2014
While I was working on a simple web based markdown editor I needed something where the users can type their texts. My first thought was to use a DIV with the contenteditable attribute. But it introduced many problems, which I did not want to fight. I only needed something simple and stupid - the good old TEXTAREA.
read more8th October 2014
Once upon a time every website was only using Arial, Verdana, Garamond or Times New Roman for rendering the text, because these font were the only ones reliably installed on almost any computer. But these times are over. Webfonts are spread all over the internet, but we still don't really know, how to load them efficiently.
read more8th October 2014
There is a very clever trick, which can turn any web page into a single page app. Without requiring you to do any significant work. Fortunately there is also a very handy tool, which makes use of this trick and does a great job.
read more6th April 2014
A few years ago I came across a simple library with which we can easily generate 8-bit sound effects for JavaScript games and apps. This library is very handy for hackathons or weekend coding sessions.
read more25th March 2014
As I already mentioned before, I really like simple things like static webpages. To speed things up, I created a boilerplate, which can be used by anybody to generate static websites.
read more11th March 2014
Have you ever installed a new GruntJS-plugin and then forgotten to load it as a task in the gruntfile.js? Matchdep is a handy tool, which can solve this issue.
read more10th March 2014
Embedding Google Maps in a website is very easy with its JavaScript API. A simple trick can improve the usability of large maps when users scroll with the mouse wheel over them.
read more2nd March 2014
As a web developers we sometimes come across some tasks which are not that strictly related to development, but rather to design. For me such a task was a few days ago, when I found a neat background pattern, but the color just didn't fit the site I was working on.
read more1st March 2014
I'm planning to create a simple 2D game in plain JavaScript. As the first step I would like to show, how to animate (pan or scroll) a background image using the canvas element. I am also going to show some basic setup code in order to have a loop where we can draw the frames.
read more15th February 2014
Finding a random element is not a trivial task when using MongoDB - especially when performance is crutial.
read more14th February 2014
Every website has some links or buttons, users are clicking on them. But do webmasters know which ones do users click most often? Are there maybe some, which are not clicked at all? Maybe you just built a shiny new navigation and you may ask "do users use it?". Clicktracking gives you the answer. When using Google Analytics the results are just shown on your dashboard.
read more13th February 2014
Personally, I was always missing some sort of comparison helper in Handlebars.js. I know, I know, it's sort of being against the philosophy of Handlebars - being logicless. But I still wanted to have it.
read more12th February 2014
Some JavaScript fun without further explanation.
var a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6];
console.log(a[3]); // 3
console.log(a[[3]]); // 3
console.log(a[[[3]]]); // 3
console.log(a[[[[3]]]]); // 3
console.log(a[[[[[3]]]]]); // 3
console.log(a["3"]); // 3
console.log(3 == [3]); // true
console.log(3 == [[3]]); // true
console.log(3 === [[3]]); // false
3 === Number([3].valueOf().toString()) // true
console.log([3].valueOf()) // [3]
console.log([3].valueOf().toString()) // 3
console.log(Number("3")) // 3
// therefore:
3 === Number([3].valueOf().toString()) // trueResources - questions on Stack Overflow:
11th February 2014
In JavaScript it is perfectly valid to have a return statement in a finally block. But this doesn't mean, you should really put it in there. Consider the following code:
function whatDoesThisReturn() {
try {
return false;
} finally {
return true;
}
}
console.log(whatDoesThisReturn());Basically the finally block is called after the try block, therefore it overrides the return value.
So this function returns true.
10th February 2014
Installing modules globally has never been a problem for me, neither on Windows nor on Ubuntu. At least until today, when I ran into a somewhat strange problem.
read more9th February 2014
JavaScript has always supported basic properties on objects. But the time is approaching when IE8 support is not relevant anymore, so we can use a more modern approach (ES5) for defining properties. There is one difference though to other programming languages - like C# - that we always define properties on objects and not on types.
read more5th February 2014
Have you enjoyed playing Mario in the old days? Me too. If you want to play with it again, you just have to follow some simple steps and the game is ready to be played right in your browser. Let's try it.
read more4th February 2014
Native apps with web technologies are not a mobile-only thing anymore. The node-webkit project makes it possible to write standalone desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. The coolest thing about this is, that both server side (node.js) and client side (jQuery, AngularJS, etc.) JavaScript libraries can be used.
read more3rd February 2014
One thing almost every website needs is redirection. Many websites decide to serve their visitors both over www and non-www site, just in case the user types it into the browser. But for SEO it's bad, when you have the same site over two different domains. Here is, how to solve this issue with NGINX.
read more3rd February 2014
A few weeks ago I posted about my PubSub module. Since then I registered it as a bower package. It was actually my first bower package. I am going to show you how easy it was.
read more2nd February 2014
Many people think that it is some kind of magic, how AngularJS resolves dependencies given as function arguments. But it isn't any magic. I'll show you, how they achieve it. This technique can be used everywhere, not just with AngularJS.
read more2nd February 2014
Have you ever needed to quickly deploy a website somewhere? Maybe to show a client some demo content? Or to show a buddy your newest static web app? Here's the solution.
read more2nd February 2014
Strong caching is very important nowadays since it can reduce page load times for the users (and eventually it can also reduce network transfer costs for the publishers). Here we see a simple example how to do it with NGINX for static files like css, JavaScript and images.
read more31st January 2014
Have you ever wondered, what's the proper way of throwing JavaScript errors? And how to handle them? Here we'll see some examples and we'll define some custom error types.
read more30th January 2014
Have you ever wondered how is it possible to support tabs in a textarea? Normally when you press the tab key, the focus jumps to the next element. But with some JavaScript 'magic' it's possible to indent or unindent the text.
read more30th January 2014
A few weeks ago I found a very amazing tool - it's called "serve".
read more29th January 2014
I have to admit, I have completely overseen, that fat arrows ( => ) are coming to JavaScript. The syntax is much the same as in C#. This also means that LINQ is also on its way to the JavaScript world.
read more26th January 2014
I was long searching for the perfect blog engine for this site. More precisely I was planning to build a blog engine myself. I wanted to keep it simple, so I didn't want to use something overkill like Wordpress or Drupal. And I also like to code. But then I realised I don't really need to do this. Building a blog engine is boring, time consuming and so on. So I had to find a simpler alternative.
read more3rd January 2014
I have always been a fan of simple things, such as the PubSub pattern. A few weeks ago I discovered this pattern again, when I was looking for a way to separate some JavaScript modules which don't really have to know about each other but have to have some sort of communication.
read more1st January 2014
So the new year has come and I decided to start a blog. I try to learn new things every day. Here I want to collect my thoughts and document what I have learned so far, so that I don't forget them and don't have to learn them again later.
read more