SitePoint.com

So… did ya miss me? I had an awesome holiday, and have come back to an overflowing feed reader. Although I may touch on some of the big things that happened while I was away, I’m going to concentrate on the current week – otherwise this post would take you an hour to read and me all day to write!

Community

It was quite a while ago now that Adobe announced that ColdFusion would become free for educational institutions. Brad Wood has posted a call to the community to help make that push successful by helping to develop curriculum for teaching …

The wisdom of the crowds has been put to use to do some awesome things already, such as create a huge encyclopedia (Wikipedia), and manage a mutual fund (Marketocracy). But what about the money of the crowd? It’s being put to use as well.

Partly based on a recurring request in our reader survey earlier this year, we’re trialling an interesting new service here on SitePoint, which we’re calling SitePoint Services. The service is offered as a partnership with VendorSeek.com, a leading internet marketing company. Here’s how it works:

A large number of vendors register to participate in a business-to-business marketplace. Vendors indicate what services they are best placed to offer, and pay a fee to register.
Visitors to SitePoint looking to purchase services such as logo design, web design, web hosting or SEO services can request quotes …

Partly based on a recurring request in our reader survey earlier this year, we’re trialling an interesting new service here on SitePoint, which we’re calling SitePoint Services. The service is offered as a partnership with VendorSeek.com, a leading internet marketing company. Here’s how it works:

A large number of vendors register to participate in a business-to-business marketplace. Vendors indicate what services they are best placed to offer, and pay a fee to register.
Visitors to SitePoint looking to purchase services such as logo design, web design, web hosting or SEO services can request quotes …

The growing availability of JSON parsing in server-side frameworks elevates the usefulness of JavaScript beyond client-side programming, to providing base syntax for a generalized data interchange format. Well duh.

But a not-immediately-obvious advantage of this is the ability to have language-independent configuration files for Ajax development.

In a nutshell — a JavaScript object-literal can be parsed as JSON with (say) PHP to create a corresponding associative array.

Consider a simple config object like this:

const config = {
‘lang’ : ‘en’,
‘host’ : ’sitepoint.com’
};

We can include that in a regular <script> and get access to its properties with JavaScript:

alert(config[’lang’]); //outputs …

Even as a self-confessed Microsoft fan boy, I have to admit that Windows Vista is one catastrophe that a $300 million advertising campaign can’t save. Here’s why …

I’ve always wanted to dabble in creating a custom font that reflected my own style and flair, but tackling the task using a professional tool always seemed too daunting. Until FontStruct, an online font construction application, came along.

Recently I had to do some mass-conversion of HTML files to DITA XML — material I’d written for the upcoming JavaScript Ultimate Reference (the third, and arguably most complicated, part of the SitePoint Reference).

But a problem I came across several times was the sheer complexity of recursive element conversion — <code> becomes <jsvalue> (or one of a dozen similar elements), <a> becomes <xref> … and that’s all simple enough; but each of these elements might contain the other, or further child elements like <em>, and as we walk through the DOM so the incidence of potential recursion increases, …