Tag: web/tech

The secret art of the tutorial

For savvy folks who love learning, there’s nothing quite like working through a polished interactive tutorial. Today’s riff will focus on the importance of great documentation, and the qualities which separate superior experiences from failed documentation efforts.

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Chaotic CoffeeScript

Thanks to a helpful reminder I got the html5 chaos field working smoothly with client side file based coffeescript (.coffee) . I found the effect at Jonas Wagner’s site, and went through the practice of converting it to CoffeeScript. The process literally took an instant thanks to js2coffee. The mods took a couple of hours to determine what was too slow or just broken about my CoffeeScript modifications. The one tiny issue I have with js2coffee is replacing 2 spaces with tabs.

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Fishing for help using Client Side CoffeeScript with .coffee files

As my client side CoffeeScript hacks grow larger1, I’m finding the constraint of keeping all the code in html script tags wrapper on page to be awkward. One little project that I’m hoping to have time for this weekend requires combining several html5 canvas effects, they may share some common elements, and each is growing unwieldy for their separate html header tags.

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The Client Server Class War

Internet traffic is undergoing an irreversible transition from predominantly pc browsing to smaller mobile devices and large displays for streaming video. Client side software has been a hot development area on mobile and novel display surfaces, as opposed to only supporting local device web browsers. Most active SaS businesses build clients for all the primary platforms – web, iOS, Android, etc., enabling customers to access provided services efficiently from any platform they choose.

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Stop bleeding on the edge of technology

A boundless and growing variety of tools comes as little surprise to active developers. It’s not uncommon for me to discover a few new frameworks a day, and read about several popular library updates each week. The same holds true for authors, artists, musicians, and other creatives. No matter what profession we select, there’s an enormous increase in the availability and variety of tools at our disposal.

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HTML to ePub and back, partial success

What I’d like to accomplish with epublishing software:

  1. Convert an intriguing site (Python for Fun) from html to epub to enable easy mobile or tablet reading while offline. Automate that process for future sites which I enjoy and which have far more content than I can consume in one sitting.

  2. Convert an existing PDF (Children of the Ark) document into a living editable wiki/web site. There are plenty of static PDFs which beg to be opened for editing by the public. Our game beta is just one of them.

  3. Convert select topics and posts from this blog into a transportable epub friendly format. I often refer to earlier blog posts. It’s fun to review what and how I thought before, and how my understanding has changed with time. Some readers prefer focused batches of content in pamphlet and book forms. I should be able to easily deliver that by organizing a few dozen posts into bundled ebook content.

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We finally really did it

We finally succeeded as a culture at breaking down communication and human attention into fragmented gibberish. The product of billions of bite sized messages is a grand sucking sound of our cognitive ability swirling down the drain. Quiet contemplation has been ousted by mass consumption, gossip mongering, and trivial conjecture1.

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Rails 3.1beta deployed to Heroku from your iPhone

The tools:

  1. Local shell, LogMeIn or an ssh shell to a terminal system on your phone/tablet
  2. a system with git and heroku (I haven’t tried installing these on my phone)
  3. Internet
  4. DropBox and DropText for easy mobile editing. Alternatively you could use github as a web editing/auto-commiting platform

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