CSS: fluid grid systems

I'm currently testing some of the recent and new possibilities offered by CSS grids and I have to say that I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Most of these grids are based on fixed sizes, meaning that the current base grid is made up of lengths measured in pixels. Pixels are a bad approach to CSS design because this approach actually doesn't take into account the problem of screen resolution. In fact, a 960 pixels grid system fails spectacularly on the most recent versions of PC and Mac monitors: simply put, it doesn't fill well the screen. A better approach is to use percentages. Let's see how.

jQuery: deferred objects and animated slideshows

Today I had to write my weekly post on the Html.it blog and I suddenly start mumbling on the recent possibilities offered by jQuery's deferred objects. When we deal with content sliders we usually have to perform two main tasks: sliding and animating. If you take a look at one of my past works, namely BTMagazine, you'll surely notice that each slide has a lot of effects and animations. You'd probably be worried by knowing that each animation set has been created by using a long chain of nested callback functions that span on several lines. In short, the code works but it's a mess. Deferred objects, instead, allow us to create all the effects we need without having to use callback functions. Let's see how.

jQuery: creating a slideshow from scratch

The theory behind a jQuery slideshow is one of the most neglected topics in a million. Many web sites provide excellent tutorials on how to create specific slideshows for specific scenarios, but there are no tutorials covering the theory and the basics of a jQuery slideshow. In short, you're a developer who wants to create a slideshow for his/her client. You've tried to use an existing plugin but the client's needs are very specific and the chosen plugin doesn't fit the bill. So you need to understand how a jQuery slideshow works in order to create a custom one. Let's get to work.

jQuery: notification message system

The most stimulating part of my job with jQuery is to turn ideas into code. Today I needed to create a notification system for a web site. A user can fill out a form by specifying if he's writing a project or a task. jQuery collects all the data and populate the corresponding item on a top menu. The most important part is that you can further extend the basic code to work with AJAX. Let's see now our implementation.