In last month's browser trends report, Internet Explorer 8.0 tripled in the USA. How does it fare in the latest figures from StatCounter?…
(The tables show market share estimates for desktop browsers. The 'change' column is the absolute increase or decrease in market share. The 'relative' column indicates the proportional change, i.e. 13% of IE10 users switched browsers last month. There are several caveats so I recommend you read How Browser Market Share is Calculated.) Phew. The market has returned to normality and most browsers rebounded to their pre-December trajectories. So why did IE8 US usage jump from 5.03% in November to 14.37% in December and back to 6.46% in January? StatCounter has added a note on the US statistics…Despite extensive investigations we have not found any evidence of bot or other invalid activity in the December stats. This spike in IE 8.0 may have been a seasonal issue as stats have now returned to levels more commonly seen earlier in 2014.
Continue reading %Browser Trends February 2015: The US IE8 Rebound%
We've already taken a close look at variable scope and hoisting, so today we’ll finish our exploration by examining three of the most important and heavily-used concepts in modern JavaScript development — closures, callbacks and IIFEs.
In JavaScript, a [closure](http://ift.tt/1fd07hh is any function that keeps reference to variables from its parent’s scope even after the parent has returned.
This means practically any function can be considered a closure, because, as we learned in the variable scope section from the first part of this tutorial, a function can refer to, or have access to –
So, chances are you’ve already used closures without even knowing it. But our aim is not just to use them – it is to understand them. If we don’t understand how they work, we can’t use them properly. For that reason, we are going to split the above closure definition into three easy-to-comprehend points.
Point 1: You can refer to variables defined outside of the current function.
In this code example, the printLocation() function refers to the country variable and the city parameter of the enclosing (parent) setLocation() function. And the result is that, when setLocation() is called, printLocation() successfully uses the variables and parameters of the former to output “You are in Paris, France”.
Continue reading %Demystifying JavaScript Closures, Callbacks and IIFEs%
One of the things you probably have noticed when you visit Bootstrap’s website is the right-side navigation that moves as you scroll through the page. This scrolling effect can be achieved combining the Affix and ScrollSpy jQuery plugins, both available as Bootstrap components.
In this article, I’ll show you how to add this cool feature to one of your own projects. As always, to better demonstrate these, I’ll use a demo project.
Let’s start by taking a look at the HTML structure of it.
For small screens we use a single column layout. For medium and large screens our layout will consist of two columns. On the one hand, we have the navigation, which occupies one quarter of a row’s width. On the other hand, we have the main content sections, which occupy the other three quarters of a row’s width. Each of these sections has an id attribute value that matches the href attribute value of the corresponding anchor (a) element.
In our example, we want the scrolling effect to occur only when the viewport exceeds 991px (i.e. medium and large screens). For this reason, we add the hidden-xs and hidden-sm helper classes to the navigation.
See the code below. Note that for brevity, we’re not including content that isn’t relevant to the technique.
Continue reading %Understanding Bootstrap’s Affix and ScrollSpy plugins%
underline.js is a javascript library that sets out to do one simple job: draw and animate the most perfect and playful text underline.
A WordPress Post Series plugin enables you to organize your posts serially to create a book or a course. It provides users a path for learning. Posts series plugins can also be used to split a long post into multiple parts.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create a plugin for displaying a series of posts. You can also integrate the same code into a theme, as theme functionality.
In WordPress, taxonomies are used to group or organize similar posts together. But WordPress doesn't provide a way to display all the posts of a particular taxonomy in a customized, serial manner. WordPress taxonomies are displayed using an archive.php file, so we cannot create a post series as a single, indexable post.
So we need a post series, which is actually one post that contains other posts in a serial manner.
There are many different ways to create a post series. Popular post series plugins found at WordPress.org use custom taxonomies on WordPress posts to create a post series, but in this tutorial I'll use Custom Post Types instead.
Create a plugin directory named sitepoint-post-series and place two files in this, named sitepoint-post-series.php and sitepoint-post-series.css.
Continue reading %Creating a Post Series Plugin for WordPress%
In this article I am going to show you how you can integrate Pushover with your Drupal site. I will illustrate a couple of examples of how you can use Pushover to notify yourself as soon as something happens on your site.
The code I write in this article is also available in this repository so you can just clone that if you want to follow along.
Pushover is a web and mobile application that allows you to get real time notifications on your mobile device. The way it works is that you install an app on your Android or Apple device and using a handy API you can send that app notifications. The great thing about this is that it happens more or less in real time (depending on your internet connection) as Pushover uses the Google and Apple servers to send the notifications.
The price is also very affordable. At a rate of $4.99 USD per platform (Android, Apple or desktop) paid only once, you can use it on any number of devices under that platform. And you also get a 5 day trial period for free the moment you create your account.
In this article I am going to set up a Pushover application and use it from my Drupal site to notify my phone of various events. I will give you two example use cases that Pushover can be handy with:
Naturally, these are examples and you may not find them useful. But they only serve as illustration of the power you can have by using Pushover.
Continue reading %Push your Drupal Site’s Events to your Phone with Pushover%
