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Top 5 Resources for JavaScript Knowledge

A good JavaScript developer, or developer of any kind, knows that it’s very wise to keep up with the times and continually be learning in order to guarantee that their knowledge doesn’t become obsolete. One of the best ways to keep knowledge fresh and up-to-date is to follow blogs that update often, such as this one. But, obviously, this is not the only JavaScript blog out there, and likely not the best. Here, you’ll find the 5 JavaScript blogs I follow the closest and have the most respect for.

Mozilla's JavaScript Battery API

As more and more web browsing devices are becoming mobile and/or battery-powered, we need to become more aware of that battery power we use in our applications. Mozilla has come up with a solution for JavaScript that allows us to monitor the battery levels of the devices that our code runs on. Sadly, Firefox is the only browser that has the API implemented, but it shouldn’t be too far in the future before the API is accepted by the other browsers.

Walking Through jQuery Plugin Boilerplate

Building jQuery plugins can be very fun and is done by many, many people today. The jQuery team has made it pretty darn easy to get up and running creating jQuery plugins, so much so that many JavaScript developers who don’t really know what they are doing jump onto the bandwagon too. This leads to horrible code floating around all over the internet. Thankfully, some very smart people came up with jQuery plugin boilerplates. Today I’ll walk you through one and show you how they make jQuery plugin coding simpler and more organized.

New Project Released: JZ Parse URL jQuery Plugin

In the advent of the recent URL Parsing tutorials (DOM URL Parsing and Query String Parsing) I’ve decided that we put the knowledge we’ve gained – plus some compatibility fixes – into practice and create a lightweight jQuery plugin that quickly and simply handles all of your URL Parsing needs. Now, rather than using regular expressions (that so few understand) or using the techniques I’ve taught to you yourself, I’ve made it simple to use a single utility function attached to jQuery.

Rise and Shine JavaScript Blog

As promised/foretold, Joe Zim’s JavaScript Blog has a shiny new face! I spent way too many hours creating this theme so that you fine people could enjoy this JavaScript blog without straining yourselves from staring at the eyesore that we had previously. I hope everyone appreciates the effort put forth and enjoys the new shine.

3 Ways to Parse a Query String in a URL

It’s not too often that a query string needs to be parsed with JavaScript, but that’s definitely not to say that it never happens. For those rare occurrences when you do need to parse the query string on the front end, there are numerous ways to parse a query string into an object with each parameter being a property of that object. In this article, I’ll show you three of those techniques and let you in on a secret of how I’m using these techniques in my own projects.

The New Face and Future of JZJS

Hello friends. I wish I could tell you that I have a wonderful new tutorial to show you today, but unfortunately the plan was to feature a guest post. Well that plan fell through, so instead I’ve decided to give you all a sneak peak at what you can expect in the near future for this JavaScript blog. This includes two major things: a new site template and future posts.

requestAnimationFrame: Video Introduction to New Animation Techniques

The arrival of requestAnimationFrame gives browsers the ability to throttle animations to save them from devouring system resources, especially when they aren’t actually being shown on the screen. Knowing this, we need to learn how to use it and then actually start utilizing this new tool for the benefit of our users. For this very reason, I decided to make this short video tutorial explaining how requestAnimationFrame can be used in the animations on your applications.

Another Failure

Hi everyone. There will be no post from me today (other than this one of course). I worked on the video tutorial for requestAnimationFrame last night and had nearly finished it when I realized that my recording software made a bunch of glitches whenever I was in the Chrome window. I’ll be re-recording it tonight using Firefox, so it’ll be available tomorrow morning. Sorry if I threw off your reading schedule. I’ll post the video as soon as it’s ready.

The Lazy Man's URL Parsing in JavaScript

Have you ever needed to parse a URL using regular expressions? It’s not easy to write regular expressions (for a lot of people, including myself) and it’s even tougher to test to see if that regular expression is reliable across every situation. You could, of course, just copy and paste a regular expression (or function or library) that someone else developed and use that, but I propose that there is a simpler and more concise way of parsing URLs that doesn’t require any regular expressions.