A while a ago I was approached by @dalager, who asked if I would be interested in giving my introductory talk about “Closures, this, call and apply” to a local audience at Community Day. I am pretty much always excited about the opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas with my tribe. So, after figuring out that I would in fact be in the area at the time of the conference, I jumped at the opportunity. With the current schedule, I’ll be speaking in the afternoon… immediately after lunch. ...

Finally, I’ve gotten round to migrating my blog from Webby to Jekyll. I guess it really is true that the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. There are a few reasons for my move away from Webby and into the open arms of Jekyll. I got really tired of writing Textile, even for the small amounts I write on this website, it got tedious. With Jekyll I write Markdown, and it’s much more enjoyable. Jekyll has an active community. The community around Webby is very small, and there are very few updates to the software. People share their Jekyll sites on github, so we can even learn from each other. It seems I am always working on my website during xmas. My dislike for writing Textile actually stifled my urge to write mostly anything on the old blog. While I still don’t have a new design (as in created by an actual designer), I am happier with the un-design of the current state than I ever was with the previous one. ...

On Saturday 2011-07-09 I attended Code Retreat Berlin, these are my notes. For those that have not been to or heard of code retreats, let me just quickly sketch out the concept. A code retreat is a place where programmers can practice their craft and improve their collaborative skills. Just like musicians need to practice, so do programmers. The day is divided up into six sessions of 45 minutes with a little retrospective break in between, and of course a lunch break. During the sessions you pair up with another programmer, and do pair programming, working on Conway’s Game of Life. Not surprisingly, the sessions were over much too quickly, just as the going was getting good. ...

“Considered harmful” has always been good link bait. I am not trying to start a flamewar, but merely express my concerns over the recent decisions of the jQuery team to actively endorse plugins that deserves no special treatment from any other plugins out there. If you have different opinions, please do respond in the comments or write a blog post expressing them. Extending globals with interesting side effects When Prototype was first released, everyone was really excited and could suddenly do a lot more with JavaScript across browsers, that would have been considered almost a black art before (to some it still is). ...

For quite a while, I have been working on a large web application for a client. For publish/subscribe style messaging in the web frontend, we use jQuery custom events triggered on the body element. This is quite a neat trick to ensure loose coupling of modules, since you’re really just tracking what the user does, and not what module happened to generate the message. This approach has been introduced to my team by me, and I have been very eager to help my team mates understand how to use it. ...

Tomorrow I will be attending dConstruct 2010, which I am very excited about. I flew in a day early, so I could get some time to enjoy Brighton. One of the first stops has been The Skiff, “a nice little place to work in the middle of Brighton”. The Skiff is indeed a very nice place: very few interruptions and very friendly people. While sitting at my visitors desk, I’ve managed to finally finish a little JavaScript library, that has been a very long time in the making: FailFast. All it took was tidying up the documentation and writing the last few missing unit tests. ...

Earlier this week, Microsoft posted an article with details on udpates to the native JSON implementation in IE8. Because of the new ECMAScript specification changes, some customers have reported issues. These issues are caused by deviations between the native JSON feature in Internet Explorer 8 and the final specification. An update is now available to address these customer issues and improve JSON interoperability of Internet Explorer 8. This update enables JSON interoperability of Internet Explorer 8 to keep in conformance with the new “ECMAScript, fifth edition” standard specification. ...

Earlier today Christian Johansen pushed the button and published Juicer v1.0.0 as a gem. For those unfamiliar with Juicer, it’s an open source Ruby based tool that allows you to merge and minify your JavaScript and CSS files. Internally, Juicer uses JSLint to keep your JavaScript in good shape and supports both YUI Compressor and Google Closure Compiler to make your CSS and JavaScript files as small as possible. I have written about speeding up your Webby site with Juicer previously, and with the new version there are even more features to like. These are the new features that exites me the most ...

On this blog I use several stylesheets to keep things (somewhat) organised. This allows me to upgrade my coderay.css file or my Tripoli CSS stylesheets without having to reorganise everything. But, just because I like to organise my code into managable chunks, doesn’t mean that I have to degrade the performance of the site for the visitors. To help me improve performance by both reducing total transfer size and amount of requests for stylesheets, I’ve added Juicer to the mix. ...

Perfect Pitch is an article by Jeremy Keith that discusses some recent issues and misuses of DMCA unfairly to destroy competitors search engine rankings. It all started out as an innocent comment about attaining Perfect Pitch on The Session. This is really just another one of those examples of American legislation that got implemented without any real thought of the consequences or of how it could be misused, not entirely unlike the Intellectual Property and Patents legislation in the U.S. GO Lobbyists!!! ...