What is RandomUser?
RandomUser is an API that provides you with a randomly generated user. These users can be used as placeholders in web mockups, and will save you time from creating your own placeholder information.
Adaptive Backgrounds – a jQuery plugin to extract dominant colors from <img> tags and apply them to their parent.
Hat tip to Thomas Gumz for this.
Bootstrap Tour provides a quick and easy way to build your product tours with Twitter Bootstrap Popovers.
It’s not secret that I do a lot of work lately with HTML/CSS, PHP, JavaScript and MySQL since my career at Clark College began a year ago. For years, make that decades I was spooled by the IBM Notes/Domino database templating feature. In the world of outside of Notes/Domino, you tend to work with a boatload of individual files when coding websites and web apps. A few months ago I came across the “Structurer” app from Nettuts+ which is the perfect tool for file based “templating”.
At the end of 2010, we released an exclusive Mac utility app, called Structurer. This app allows you to rapidly create file/folder structures for your new projects. Less than a month later, the developer, Cesar Tessarin, is back with a much improved version which now provides support for template creation, as well as assigning custom content automatically to newly created files. It’s fantastic, and, even better, 100% free to all of our readers!
Download Structurer for OS X >
There is also a “Structurer Pro” version available for Nettuts+ Premium Members >
Update: Hat tip to Jino Conklin for showing me Structurer in class earlier this quarter.
Cool trick for parsing URLs without an JavaScript libraries https://t.co/KA5UnLz211
— Ryan Baxter (@ryanjbaxter) November 24, 2013
Ryan Baxter tweeted this out earlier and I wanted to share it with all you JavaScript developers out there as it is a nice and elegant way to not have to use a library such as URI.js:
var parser = document.createElement('a');
parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";
parser.protocol; // => "http:"
parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
parser.port; // => "3000"
parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
parser.search; // => "?search=test"
parser.hash; // => "#hash"
parser.host; // => "example.com:3000"
Enjoy and thanks Ryan!
Sometime in February 2014, Steve McDonagh and I will be launching an online coding school. I hear you saying “Bruce, there are tons of these available already. Why would you do this?”. Well, let me tell you why. Our school will hold one class at a time and will be limited to twenty students. Ten of them will work with Steve and ten of them will work with me.
Our first course “Introduction to JavaScript and jQuery” will be ten weeks in duration. We will be using an online Learning Management System and there will be homework (lots of it), quizzes, graded discussions and a final project. Let me tell you, the course won’t be easy but, if you work hard you will come out with an awesome set of foundational JavaScript skills. Steve and I will be there every step of the way for extra help via online meetings, Skype calls etc. Whatever it takes for you to succeed in our course – we will be there along the way.
Upon completion of the class, attendees can make a $50 donation that will be given to charity if they wish.
Enrollment will open starting in January. Stay tuned for more information and for a list of other courses we plan on offering.
Bruce Elgort 