Should I use px or ems for css font-size? Neither, use rem!

posted in articles

 

While setting the size of a font is relatively simple; choosing the unit of measuring the size can become complex quickly.

At their core there are two types of font-size units; relative and absolute. Relative units are calculated by their parent element's font-size while absolute units are set at a fixed value. Both types of units are useful.

Responsive Browser Testing with Adobe Edge Inspect

posted in articles

 

Testing for mobile devices can be a royal pain in the butt. There are so many different device facets to keep in mind. There are about twenty different brands, a near endless supply of device resolutions, and newer features like retina display that require addtional testing. Now with the surge of popularity of responsive web design, we now have one more thing to test. Ready to pull your hair out yet?

What is Object Oriented Programming?

posted in articles

 

Phew... that was a mouthful. Here is how I would define Object Oriented Programming; A programming pattern that allows specific chunks of functionality (objects) to interact with each other through the use of class functions (methods) and store class specific data (properties).

Create a jQuery Twitter plugin from scratch

posted in articles

 

Over the next couple posts in this series I will walk you through building your very own Twitter jQuery plugin from scratch. By the end of this series you will better understand the structure of a jQuery plugin, regular expressions, jQuery optimization, datetime manipulation, and jQuery chaining. Additionally, you will have a working plugin which will grab tweets directly from the twitter api. This is a solution based off something that I have used on a number of sites.

How to prevent html textarea resizing using css

posted in today i learned

 

Here is a simple trick I found out by blind luck. I wanted to prevent the textarea tag's default resizing in Chrome and Firefox. As there seems to be no attribute available for the tag such as resize="false" (Come on W3C...) I began looking for an alternative. It's actually quite easy to lock a text area using only CSS.

Firemin: The Firefox memory leak fixer app

posted in articles

 

Until recently Firefox has always felt like a double-edged sword to me. The developer's add-ons have always been a pleasure to use. Firebug, ySlow, PageSpeed, Web Developer are all essential for web design. Unfortunately, my favorite, firebug, has been notorious for turning into a zombie and snacking on my computer's memory (that no amount of Left 4 Dead can solve!). Leave the browser open a couple hours and viola you have a standards compliant browser that runs slower than IE6.