Authoring a css book and what is next

I neglected quite a bit my blog for some times now .. After 3 years of doing this I feel like I have less and less to say about web development. Well not that it happens to every blogs of course . I still have some stuff for you guys, but I feel my time doing one article a week is gone.

Confoo conference

This year I am trying to do a talk at the Confoo conference, basically it’s an introduction course at code organization with jQuery, called jQuery Spaghetti. It’s probably not for most of you guys and I know it has been done in other js conferences, but I feel like Confoo will have quite a bit of ‘hobby’ jQuery devs since it’s really a…

Creating a CSS3D hovering state with fallback for older browsers

HTML5 & CSS3 are a big sugar rush in the front-end community currently, you can see those nice CSS3 buttons popping everywhere around the web. For one project I am working on I wanted to use a nice 3d flip effect like this one.

Unfortunately that kind of effect is currently only achievable with Safari and Chrome, so to make this thing work I needed a normal hover behavior for other browsers, and that is what I wanted to show you how to do here.

.containerCard {
height:194px;
position:relative;
background:#fff;
width:144px;
}
.containerCard .element{
height:194px;
position:absolute;
top:0; left:0;
background:#fff;
width:144px;
} .containerCard .elementB{
display:none;
} .containerCard:hover .elementA {
display:none;
} .containerCard:hover .elementB{
display:block;
} @media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
.containerCard .elementB{
-webkit-transform: rotateY(-180deg);
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
-webkit-backface-visibility:…

Handling javascript errors on production websites

Handling javascript errors as always been sort of a problem for me. Testing every combination possible in a big application is hard, and there is always a chance you will miss something.

Of course, we should always strive to make an application as bug free as possible, but users seems to always find a way to break it. You can always expect them to do something you never have think of, and this is one of the reason I created this plugin.

When a javascript error is detected, this plugin will do an ajax request to your server and then sends an email, of course you could also log it in a database. It’s certainly not a revolutionary idea, but still, I was finding the idea cool…

Going to war, web developer style

There is bad customer services everywhere, but nothing quite compares to The Brick for me. Here in Quebec we get raped by Telecom companies on cellphone plans and internet, we pay much more for less, and yet, today I am really more pissed off at The Brick.

I am going to spare you the details of my adventure with them, you can find all the details here. Let’s just say that I bought some furniture and I am really not happy with it.

War, guerrilla style!

I was so pissed off about my discussion with their customer support that I decided to create a website to tell everyone about how shitty The Brick is, and I did it in little more than 4 hours. First thing first, I…

Introducing hooks in the jQuery form validation engine plugin

Hooks are a new feature just introduced into the engine recently. This makes it very easy to add extra behaviors on top of the current error prompts.

The hooks make the use of the jQuery custom event feature. A good example of use would be to add a mention that there is a problem at the form beginning when an error is found.

See the Demo
Download Plugin

There are currently 3 hooks implemented in the engine. One that is triggered before the validation, one after each field validation, and one, finally, with the form result.

* jqv.form.validating : Triggers when the form is submitted and before it starts the validation process
* jqv.field.result(event, field, errorFound, prompText) : Triggers when a field is validated with the result.
* jqv.form.result(event, errorFound) : Trigger when a…

Using form ajax validation with the jQuery Validation Engine plugin

Since 2.0 a lot of people wondered how was working the new ajax validation. Doing ajax validation and controlling the submit form event has always been an headache, and while the validation engine aspire to make it as easy as possible, it is probably never going to be simple for junior developers.

To be fair, the ajax feature has been rewritten and was not as mature as in the 1.7 version. However the 2.x base code is starting to be pretty good with the recent updates. If no other bugs popup, I will start tagging the 2.x releases on github and this version will be considered stable for a while.

There is 2 demos added to the repository, one with only the inline validation and another with…

The iframe cross-domain policy problem

I wrote a small post on Cakemail blog about using iframes, here an excerpt and a link to the full article.

If you are a front-end developer that need to use a cross-domain iframe, you know pain. You could write a nice bit of code and get it working on firefox but it would crash on ie. You would think that would be easy – facebook, twitter and all the others cool kids are doing it! Well, not quite.

Here at Cakemail we are currently building a platform that will enable our users to create forms and embed them in their website directly (think an email list subscription form). So basically, we needed to have javascript control in the parent and in the child.

We had 2 problems…

A front-end developer journey into symfony..

I love doing HTML/CSS/Javacscript, but what happens when you want to create a project that Wordpress can’t handle? Beside finding someone who can do it I mean.. Well you have to learn new stuff and this is how I immersed myself in more complex back-end work.

Making a framework choice

Where do I start? like anyone I guess, I check for the best framework to learn. Obviously I am not going to create my own MVC framework, some of the best php guys are already doing that (And also I suck at doing php). And I am not going to use a CMS, not enough barebone to do an app, less extensible and also more security problems (plus I hate Joomla and Drupal). So I browse the web, django,…

Form validation engine 2.0 is live

As said previously a rewrite of the validation engine has been in the work for sometimes and today it is finally live, the API changed a lot, might be a good idea to have a look at the new documentation if you are upgrading.

I will be updating the documentation today, but the most up to date doc will always be the readme on github. The legacy 1.7 documentation and download can be found under package when you hit download on github

Time to stop squeezing ketchup (inside joke) and hail to the beast.

Form validation engine 2.0 will be live soon

I will be updating the validation engine to version 2.0 this week, you can have a preview of the beast here. This version is a complete rewrite of the actual code, and mostly all api’s had changes, so if your upgrading, you better have a good look at the documentation (see readme).

The rewrite was done by Olivier Refalo, I wanted to do a rewrite for some times but a lack of time and passion about this stopped me. The script was near 3 years old and while I was happy with it, to stay in a “modern” javascript world it needed significant changes.

The core of the library stayed the same, but what is wrapping is a lot better, Olivier also did a nice rewrite of…