Christmas is coming but I still have no plan… yet. But let’s forget about that special day for now and blog like it’s another usual day.
Two things that have caught my web-development goggles – Feedly, a well-done web-application by DevHD and JSNinja, the book written by John Resig (the guy behind JQuery). If you’ve read this far and haven’t got a clue, you may continue reading at your own peril (of not understand a word from what I’m going to blog!).
I’m using Feedly now actually, and the instant effect is that NewsFire – that cool application to read RSS feeds on Mac OS X, has been dumped right away into my Trash bin. It’s so much easier (and kewler) to read stuffs with Feedly. For starters, you can try it out if you have a Google Account (it uses as backend Google Reader) and if you run Firefox. I’m not sure whether it can run without the Firefox add-on or not, but I really don’t care. My web-developing soul is crying out loud that it’s bad to support just one browser, but hey, this is just what I’m using, so Feedly fits perfectly in.
It’s a bit hard to configure like you want it, but the default probably will be good for almost everyone (well, you might want to turn off stuffs like the Stocks add-on in the sidebar if you’re not into finance!). I’ve got mine to a good-enough configuration (a shame I can’t make my own CSS style, but I’ll probably be too lazy to do it – and the default theme from Feedly is sublime enough). The nice thing? It actually feels like you’re reading a magazine of some sort instead of just a list of feeds. “Human” side to it I guess? For example, I’m a poster @ GameVN (won’t tell you what’s my nickname!), and as every vBulletin does – GameVN has a RSS Feed (they even kindly provide v0.91 or v2). It can be configured into individual subforums (I have mine set as 82, 84 and 371 – go figure what those subboxes are!). If I included that into a RSS Feed reader program, like NewsFire, it would feel very plain – instead, Feedly extracts out the image in the post and puts it in a nicely presented way so that a topic in GameVN, which normally would look so unprofessional (understandably), instantly turned into something similar to an article from Ars Technica. Oh, I also subscribe to that one.
I’m not sure to what extent does the add-on make feedly work, but the visual thing that you’ll notice if you do install it on your Firefox is a green button with Feedly’s icon (fits in nicely with my Naver theme btw!) – it sits just beside your “home” button, that I never use.
Anyway, give it a try if you’re interested!
The second thing is that book. Javascript Ninja, fitting name for someone like myself or anyone who’s been working far long enough with Javascript to understand how its confusing closure system works. Wait, you don’t know what’s a Javascript Ninja? Here, let me show you the secret of our arts…
A Javascript Ninja
I’ve known about it ever since last year actually, working at <censored>. Someone from the team bought the book (it’s not finished yet but by preordering it you have access to chapters in pdf form as soon as it’s out) – and he kindly uploaded it up into our central repository… talk about copyright infringement *cough*! Well, not that I mind. Though at that time I was far less interested in that way of working with Javascript – I was more of an organized soul looking into ways to wrestle with MVC in Javascript. I’ve long abandoned that idea now, especially concentrating on this final year’s project which requires the use of both client-side scripting and server-side development. I’d really like to get that book (buy it), but I guess I’m going to hold back that thought – maybe it’ll fire up again when it’s completed and published.
On another unrelated note, Wordpress announced their upgrade to 2.9 some days ago. If you’re wondering why this blog is still on 2.8.x, well, we’re actually using mu-Wordpress. Enough said.
That’s it for now! Back to coding hell…
Tsumugi from K-ON!
… no unfortunately it doesn’t look as relaxing and fun like Tsumugi in that picture :( …
孝