Bear Grylls

Bear Grylls is known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.
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The State of Social Sharing in 2017 [infographic]

Social Marketing is becoming more and more complex.Every year new challengers try to grab some of Facebook’s market share. In some cases, it can be a great opportunity for businesses that want to get an edge over the competition. At GetSocial, we’re tracking 30+ social networks and messaging apps,...

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Learning JavaScript: 9 Common Mistakes That Are Holding You Back

A lot of people try to learn JavaScript and then give up. Then they tell themselves things like, "JavaScript is too confusing," or worse, "Maybe I'm not cut out for web development."

The sad part? There was no need to give up. All that was needed was a different learning approach.

In this article, we'll cover some of the most common learning mistakes people make and find out how to avoid them. Many of these tips will be applicable outside of JavaScript or even web development, so there's that bonus too.

Let's dive in!

Mistake #1: Overanalyzing Instead of Getting Started

It can be tempting to look for all the information you can get before you start learning JavaScript. If you look, you'll find information about how JavaScript is the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, or that you need to be on this framework or that framework. You might also hear that you need to write JavaScript a certain way or else you'll never be a "real" developer.

Whether or not these points have validity, nothing is worse than the six months to a year you'll waste agonizing instead of starting.

Just type one line of code. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can be terrible. If you get started, you've already passed one of the hurdles that stop a lot of people.

Mistake #2: Learning a Framework Before Learning Plain JavaScript

JavaScript frameworks are built on top of vanilla JavaScript, so if you understand JavaScript, you automatically understand the fundamentals of how to use any JavaScript framework.

However, if you jump straight into a framework, you'll end up memorizing without understanding. It's like trying to write sentences without knowing what words mean. You'll end up memorizing random phrases instead of understanding how words work and how to put them together to make your own sentences.

If you go straight to a framework it'll be harder to learn and you'll have a harder time adapting to another framework if you need to. If you learn plain JavaScript first, you have a firm basis to understand all the frameworks.

Mistake #3: Moving to the Next Step Too Soon

One of the most common mistakes is to move on immediately after understanding a concept.

I've definitely struggled with this one because it's tempting to move forwards once you understand something.

What helped was to treat each concept like a new toy; That means taking some time to enjoy what you just learned. Play around, experiment, see if you can do something new with it. You'll learn a lot that way, and you'll remember better as well.

Once you feel like you can apply a concept in your sleep, move on. It takes a little bit more time up front, but soon it makes everything go much faster.

On the other hand, if you rush, you'll end up forgetting and having to backtrack for every little thing. That ends up taking way more time, and it can be discouraging. In fact, this is a common reason people have said they quit JavaScript.

Mistake #4: Not Breaking Concepts Into Small Enough Pieces

Learning is like a staircase: If you can take one step, you can keep taking more steps until you reach your goals. When something is tough to understand, it's often because you're trying to take a flying leap instead of going one step at a time. Of course, it seems impossible!

Continue reading %Learning JavaScript: 9 Common Mistakes That Are Holding You Back%

by Yaphi Berhanu via SitePoint

5 Social Sharing Tools for Teams

Do you want your employees to contribute to your social media marketing? Looking for tools to manage the content people share on social? In this article, you’ll discover five tools that will help you coordinate the content your team posts on social media. #1: Leverage Employee Advocacy With Smarp If you’re looking for ways to [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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How to Create CSS Conic Gradients for Pie Charts and More

More and more websites use gradients in one way or another. Some websites use them for navigation components, while others use them in elements like buttons, or with images to create some nice effects.

All browsers have had support for basic CSS linear and radial gradients for a long time now. The CSS Gradients: A Syntax Crash Course article on SitePoint gives you a quick summary of the syntax required to create linear and radial gradients, as well as how to use repeating gradients to create some basic patterns, which is great if you care about web performance and try to avoid using images whenever possible.

After linear and radial gradients, browsers are now slowly starting to support conic gradients, which were first championed by Lea Verou.

In this article, you will learn about the syntax, uses, and browser support for simple conic gradients and repeating conic gradients.

What are Conic Gradients?

Conic and radial gradients are similar in the sense that both of them start from a specified or default point as the center of the circle used to draw them. The difference between the two is that, in the case of radial gradients the color-stops are placed along the radial line, while in the case of conic gradients the color stops are placed along the circumference of the circle.

The position of color-stops for a conic gradient can be specified either in terms of percentage or in terms of degrees. A value of 0% or 0deg refers to the top of the conic gradient. The values keep increasing gradually as you move clockwise. A value of 360deg is equivalent to 0deg. Any color whose color-stop value is greater than 100% or 360deg won't be drawn on the conic gradient but it will still affect its color distribution.

The following image shows a conic gradient that starts with a yellow color and ends with orange.

It is hard not to notice the sharp transition that separates the orange at 360deg from the yellow at 0deg. Remember that conic gradients always produce this transition whenever the starting and ending colors of the conic gradient are very different. One way to avoid it is setting the starting and ending color to the same value.

Syntax for Conic Gradients

Continue reading %How to Create CSS Conic Gradients for Pie Charts and More%

by Gajendar Singh via SitePoint

6 jQuery Form Wizard Plugins

A jQuery Form Wizard is a jQuery plugin that assists with the creation of forms with some sort of form flow (without refreshing your page). For example, if you had a large form for entering user data, you could use a form wizard to divide it into a series of related steps. This has the advantage of not overwhelming users with a really long form and also giving them some indication of their progress as they enter their information.

In this post we list 6 of our favorite jQuery form wizards, examine their different features and finally look at a couple of paid options, as well as how to create your own. This isn't intended to be an exhaustive list, but if you are looking for a jQuery form wizard, then hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

This popular post was updated on 30.08.2017. Broken / abandoned plugins were removed from the list and new plugins were added to reflect features people were asking for in the comments.

1. jQuery Steps

jQuery Steps is a smart UI component which allows you to easily create wizard-like interfaces. This plugin groups content into sections for a more structured and orderly page view. It has a plethora of features, such as async content loading, state persistence (it saves your input between steps) and transition effects between sections. It can be installed via NuGet or bower and has a well-documented and feature-rich API.

Homepage | GitHub | Demo

2. jQuery Smart Wizard

Smart Wizard is a flexible and heavily customizable jQuery step wizard plugin with Bootstrap support. It is easy to implement and gives a neat and stylish interface for your forms, checkout screen, registration steps etc. Its features include theme support (with various themes included), URL navigation and step selection and the ability to dynamically hide or disable steps. It can be installed via npm, bower or composer and has a well-documented and feature-rich API.

Homepage | GitHub | Demo

3. formToWizard

This lightweight plugin turns any webform into multi-step wizard with jQuery, whereby every form <fieldset> is turned into a separate step with forward and back buttons. It doesn't have nearly as many features as the previous two plugins, but does integrate with the jQuery validation plugin to provide validation functionality. It is a single file (so you can just grab it off GitHub and go) and if JavaScript is unavailable, it degrades gracefully.

GitHub | Demo

Continue reading %6 jQuery Form Wizard Plugins%

by James Hibbard via SitePoint