25 February 2017 - Walkabout
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)

It has been 14 months since i last posted an update to this site, I'd like to get into that, but first some quick news:

elementals.js re-launched

This small JavaScript library of mine has been relaunched. I killed it off a little over two years ago because it was sitting there rotting after a falling out with those who I brought in to help maintain it, repeated struggles to fix bugs inherent in a methodology I let myself get talked into by others that was flawed to the core (extending the Element object that of course IE can't extend without a ton of workarounds), and finally my health taking another unexpected turn south.

I brought it back at the urging of a few folks who were genuinely interested in it, and in two weeks with just one person running around double-checking me (well, another person did step up to the plate via the contact form) we have accomplished in two weeks what six months of struggles by a team of six could not... a release bug-free enough for me to label it as a release candidate!

So please, go over to the elementals.js website, have a look at the library and demos, and any feedback, comments, advice, or just plain bitching, feel free to use the contact form over there.

This site

Again, 14 months is a long time to leave a site hanging, but I covered a lot of ground filling the site up with content I'd been gathering for years during that first three months. The real killer though was that I have other projects, paying work comes before non-paying, and haven't been in the best of health.

31 December, 2015 - Two New Tutorials, Happy New Year!
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)

Laddy, we're in engineering; call me Scotty! A good engineer is always
a wee bit conservative...
at least on paper!

Figured while waiting around for the new year, I'd belt out two simple tutorials as a little treat for everyone else. Since my New Years resolution was to get this site up and running, and I got it working BEFORE the New Year, it's time to focus on content. Once again my habit of doing a "Mr. Scott" on my time estimates paid off quite well, in the Ach laddy, ya didnae tell him how long it would REALLY take did ye? kind of way.

The first of these tutorials is fairly simple, it just covers a simple way of creating a ratings bar. Using stars or other symbols for ratings on websites is a very common thing, but most methods involved multiple extra files; quite often one for every possible combination! There's a very simple way of handling it with little if any effort in the markup, and some very simple CSS reducing the "stars" or other symbols to one simple image... and since it's in our CSS, we can even leverage the "scaleable images" methodology from that previous tutorial.

30 December, 2015 - Tutorials Section Added, Still Working On More Content
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)

CSS3

As you can see there's now a tutorials button on the menu. Pages that are more about how to do things will be going there for now instead of under articles. I hope to expand that section fairly quickly with a lot of the tips, tricks and methods I use to build sites. The first finshed tutorial, CSS Tilesheets -- Scaleable "Sprites" is up there, as is a "work in progress" about forms that I put up for now so I can point at it in a few threads on various forums.

Tutorials and Articles are just content categories in the underlying system, which is why I've flagged both to record any tags I assign to the same content-tags sidebar in both those sections. I also plan on adding a reviews section where tools, other people's articles from other sites, and other web development related items will get ripped to shreds reviewed by me.

The first tutorial addresses the problem a lot of the use of images introduces with modern browsing devices not all having the same dot pitch -- with devices of 150ppi or more becoming commonplace in the mobile market, and so called "4K pixel" displays a reality for many desktop users.

Projects

  • elementals.js
    A lightweight JavaScript library focusing on cross browser support, ECMAScript polyfills, and DOM manipulation.
  • eFlipper.js
    An image carousel script using elementals.js
  • eProgress.js
    A JavaScript controllable progress bar using elementals.js. Based on the nProgress project that relies on the much heavier jQuery library.

/for_others

Browse code samples of people I've helped on various forums. These code snippets, images, and full rewrites of websites date back a decade or more, and are organized by the forum username of who I was helping. You'll find all sorts of oddball bits and pieces in here. You find any of it useful, go ahead, pick up the ball, and run with it.

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