while($alive) LiveAndLearn();

A lot of people – most, really – can’t write code. In the new millennium, this is no longer a normal thing – being able to handle any sort of technical job, from fixing some HTML to delving into and contributing to an open-source project, is a desirable trait in anyone, especially those looking for work! So how do you go about learning it if you can’t afford a course or you’re not really into the idea of leafing through a textbook?

Codeyear does what it says on the tin – in a year, they will teach you to be a coder. Maybe not the best one, but with their current Javascript, HTML and CSS lessons, they’re aiming to help you understand what goes into making a site like partypoker or Facebook work. For all you know, you may even end up building your own, or turning your newly acquired skills into improved ones in order to change careers.

The great thing about it is that it’s aimed at the total beginner. All you do is type, and the clear instructions will explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, giving you small objectives to accomplish. Sounds like a textbook job, right? Wrong. You also get points and win badges as you go along, which can be a really great way to keep yourself motivated when things get tricky.

Best of all, it’s completely free. That’s right – you don’t pay a single cent, and there’s not a shred of advertising anywhere on the site. This is created by people who want to help others to learn to code, and that’s a grand ambition for those who could be spending that time on their own work. If you want to learn some Javascript, then take advantage of Codeyear and their community’s generosity, and get stuck in.

Today while rumbling around with some JavaScript and HTML I accidentally stumbled upon another JavaScript lab similar to JS Bin which I mentioned in my previous post. It’s called JSFIDDLE and it looks very promising, and it has more features than JS Bin.

You can type in your CSS and HTML in separate windows for starters, and one really cool feature is the TidyUp which helps you reformat unreadable code into readable code whether it’s HTML or JavaScript, really nice.

JSFIDDLE uses JSLint to validate JavaScript and you can include your favorite JavaScript API to code up against, although it doesn’t seem like you can select more than one at a time, and it’s not shown in your code which framework you are using, however it’s visible in the sidebar on the left which also contains a number of examples by the way.

So far I’ve tested it in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, and it works a lot better in IE8 than JS Bin does, so I might have found a replacement for JS Bin. Furthermore there is also support for testing AJAX requests.

Happy hacking!

How often haven’t I created that infamous test.html page to verify that my JavaScript manipulated the DOM in the way I expected it to? Often such experiments include usage of jQuery or other commonly used JavaScript libraries. Precious time lost creating similar test files over and over again, okay well perhaps a bit exaggerated, but still a pain.

However now I’ll never need to create another test.html page again thanks to JS Bin. It’s the perfect JavaScript lab at least for me; the screen is split in two, and on the left you have a JavaScript editor on the right an HTML editor, both with Syntax Highlighting, and other nice to have features. From a drop down list in the top you can include your favorite JavaScript libraries and you are ready to hack away!

It is in my opinion a perfect learning environment if you are new to JavaScript, HTML5 or both, you can play around with new ideas, more abstract aspects of JavaScript, or what-ever you want. JS Bin was built by Remy Sharp who you can follow on Twitter here @rem, that’s how I found out about JS Bin. Remy tweets about JavaScript, HTML 5 and other such gems very useful stuff indeed.

I also recommend reading John Resig’s blog, John Resig is probably already well-known to you as the creator and lead developer of the jQuery library, but he has also written some books about JavaScript programming and created a very useful tutorial for learning more advanced JavaScript topics. You can follow John on Twitter here @jeresig

Oh man my desktop is a mess, once again, I can’t believe it! I try to keep it clean, but sometimes my downloads control me, and yeah well, then it’s just easier to put it on the desktop, my Eeec’s desktop is chaos.

In the past I cleaned up once or twice on my old laptop simply by moving everything to a folder called “Must clean-up”, didn’t help much, before long I had a folder called “Must clean-up part II”.

Anyway during my recent look-at-and-throw-away session I came across another sketch I made with Harmony:

I haven’t had much time to learn much about HTML5 but here the other day I came across Chrome Experiments which contains a lot of small to larger experiments utilizing HTML5 features.

The site is awesome and there is a lot of inspiration to gather from the experiments. I tried out a few, and will return again later, with the Harmony experiment I created the following sketch in few minutes, so much fun.