Behind The Scenes Site Update (5/20/2011)

Oh noes! No graphic at the top of this post. It must be serious ;  )

Hey guys. I wanted to give you a quick update on what's going on behind the scenes with the site at the moment.

For intermediate developers

Luckily, there's been quite a bit of interest expressed in continuing on with the large jQuery applications series that I began a few months ago and I'll be posting more tutorials on Backbone.js, JMVC, spine.js and other tools over the coming weeks (I'm working on a new Backbone/jQuery mobile app post as we speak). I'm quite relieved that other developers are just as excited about the potential that frameworks like Backbone have and it's my hope that a focus on solid tools that can aid your development process may help build more solid applications at the end of the day.

I'm also working on my slides for a jQuery talk in early May here in London (which may cover application architecture further) as well as a JavaScript Design Patterns talk for Web Directions later in the month. If you plan on being around please feel free to come down and join us for either. Julian Aubourg (who was responsible for the $.ajax rewrite in jQuery 1.5 *may* be making an appearance for a talk at the first, but I'll let you know closer to the date based on his availability). He's a great guy and an exceptional developer.

For beginners

I know that a portion of the audience that follow the blog are still very much beginners to jQuery (or JavaScript in general) and I'm doing my best to balance the content that can help both beginners and intermediate developers (you won't be left behind). My recent slides on 'Evaluating jQuery Learning Material' are something that I would have liked to have known when I was first starting out and I'll be intermittently releasing further learning material that might assist similarly.

In addition, I'm currently involved in two different jQuery learning initiatives that might push useful content out that beginners might be interested in later on in the year, but as these are very much volunteer driven we'll see just how far we can get before making any official announcements about launch dates. Time is something we're unfortunately always trying to prioritize so fingers crossed, you'll have more to look at soon.

Updating legacy content

This is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I've also begun rewriting a number of the open-source plugins or tutorial solutions I've created in the past to ensure that they follow the current best practices.

Whilst the code in some tutorials hasn't been fundamentally flawed, time constraints when I was writing them up mean that there are a number of places where the code could be more DRY, variables cached and I'm kicking myself for anywhere that used UA testing – there aren't that many instances but it's just plain wrong and I strongly recommend avoiding it where possible. Instead, use vendor prefix testing if you at all need to do browser testing for CSS3 prefix purposes.

Some of my older code also didn't follow the jQuery core style guidelines which I'd also like to correct.

Moving away from WordPress?

Unfortunately, a lot of the time spent pushing posts out revolves around getting mark-up to legibly fit within the narrow site container I currently use. WordPress really isn't the best platform for pushing code-samples nor a reliable version history, so I'm also giving some thought to moving the site over to a mark-down/GitHub driven setup. This also supports the idea of the community submitting edits or updates to content which they may feel are relevant and would help move the site from a simple blog to a community resource. There would be a lot of effort required to make the move, so we'll see what solution I can come up with.

During times when components or older posts are being updated, you may see a slight drop in the amount of new content being published on the site, but rest assured it's still active. I've been fortunate enough to see it grow to almost 200,000 visitors a month and I hope that I can meet your expectations for what gets covered over the next year. That said, I want this site's focus to be quality rather than quantity and any future posts will try to keep this in mind.

What do you want to see on the site?

I'd really like to hear what you would be interested in seeing covered on the site in the future. If you have comments on topics, content, mediums, the layout..anything at all, please feel free to share them in the comments below. Reddit and Hacker news readers have helped steer the direction of changes made to the site in the past and I'm happy to accept feedback or constructive criticism on anything that may help the site improve further.