javascript - Coffee on the Keyboard

New Year, New Role

Yesterday was my last day at the job I’ve been in for most of 2015. Later this month I’ll be joining the digital team at Condé Nast! I’ve been interested in media, publishing, and journalism since I was a kid, growing up in the office of a

Back-end

Visualizing the 2015 SotU on TodaysMeet

Now that you know how TodaysMeet works, here’s part 2: using the message queue architecture to build the SotU visualizations. TodaysMeet has a long history with political events. During the 2012 Presidential debates, I was at a stranger’s apartment—guest of a guest—half-listening (binders full of what

django

How TodaysMeet Works

I want to write about TodaysMeet’s 2015 State of the Union site, but I realized I spent half the time on the existing architecture. So, this is part 1, and here is part 2! A little over two years ago, I set out to completely replace TodaysMeet’s platform.

api

Irregular Update, 24/Oct/2014

Another update! Wow! The past two weeks have all been on TodaysMeet Teacher Tools except for the afternoon I spent dealing with a hurt finger (not exactly badly hurt but I still can’t really use my right index finger to type, it’s annoying). And at some point in

architecture

The Problem with TodaysMeet

TodaysMeet is a project I started in 2008 to help my father solve a problem in one of his classes. The fact that it’s as popular as it is—mostly in education—never ceases to amaze me. Unfortunately, I don’t give TodaysMeet the attention it, and more importantly

Code

JavaScript: Private Static Members, Part 2

Finally, it’s time to finish up the lesson on private static members and methods in JavaScript. Last time, I introduced the technique of creating and immediately executing a function, using parentheses. I talked a little about returning a function and storing it in a variable. 1. var myFunc = (function(

Code

JavaScript: Private Static Members, Part 1

A little while ago I talked about creating private variables and methods in JavaScript. This works, but is not necessarily efficient: each instance of the class creates new copies of the members. While that may be exactly what you want for instance variables (think of partNum in the old examples)

firefox

Firefox: Open in Blank Tab

If you don’t use Firefox 3, go get it. Then finish this article. (Safari and Opera users are excused, but there’s no promise this will work for them.) One of my (few) gripes with Firefox is that bookmarks on the toolbar have no “open in blank tab” option.

client-side

Private Variables in JavaScript

Ok, enough of this social/ranting stuff. Time to write something vaguely technical. I have a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. I think anyone who works with it does. Sometimes it just doesn’t do what you expect, and it’s certainly different. One trick, especially for people from real Object-Oriented

Browsers

Chrome Is Not A Browser

If you somehow haven’t heard of it, Google’s Chrome is a neat, quick, Acid2-compliant “browser” designed to work with web applications, not web pages. Chrome certainly looks like a modern browser, with tabs along the top and an address bar and a “Most visited” home screen, it will