lots of readi

Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. They are both exciting and a fascinating topic to explore in any programming language. One reason for this is that they help us build upon the combined experience of many developers that came before us and ensure we structure our code in an optimized way, meeting the needs of problems we're attempting to solve. Design patterns also provide us a common vocabulary to describe solutions. This can be significantly simpler than describing syntax and semantics when we're attempting to convey a way of structuring a solution in code form to others. In this book we will explore applying both classical and modern design patterns to the JavaScript programming language.

I've uploaded Hoverbattles to its own server on EC2, and it has been running fine with an uptime of over 96 hours so far, and this is great!

http://hoverbattles.com

I've wanted to share a few of the mistakes/lessons learned writing and deploying a multiplayer game built entirely with JavaScript on top of NodeJS and WebGL for a while and this represents an opportune moment to do so.

I've gone with a brain-dump of various related learnings, as well as a couple of periphery items - first off, we'll go with the reason I couldn't keep Hoverbattles up on the old server.

In this article I hope to take you through the steps required to get a fully-functional (albeit feature-light) persistent blogging system running on top of node.

The technology stack that we'll be using will be node + express + mongoDB all of which are exciting, fast and highly scalable. You'll also get to use jade and stylus for driving the templated views and styling! We will be using npm to ease the package management and installation issues.

This article will be fairly in-depth so you may want to get yourself a rather large mug of whatever beverage you prefer before you settle down :)

A few days ago I was doing a TON of scraping, and as you know, without the right tools, scraping can be a REAL pain. Out of my pain comes your pleasure — here’s a list of scraping tools and resources which will make your life MUCH easier the next time you need some information from a crufty old website. If you’re short on time, skip to the end and read the tl;dr.

For more complex and customizable plugins that provide many options, it's a best practice to have default settings that can get extended (using $.extend) when the plugin is invoked. So instead of calling a plugin with a large number of arguments, you can call it with one argument which is an object literal of the settings you would like to override. Here's how you do it.

if(typeof myVar !== ‘undefined’ || myVar) {
// myVar is defined and not empty
}

In today’s article we are going to create a very basic blog that allows people to create a post and posts comments on that post via AJAX. We are going to keep it extremely basic and just focus on that actual AJAX functionality.

IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

In particular, Jorge Mesa writes to ask how to re-create their 'puff' popup bubble shown when you mouse over the download image.

In essence the effect is just a simple combination of effect, but there's a few nuances to be wary of.

jQuery plugin: Tooltip

Interesting reflection script with the photos