MarcGrabanski.com - Jack of All Trades Web Development

Happy News on The jQuery Course

Marc Grabanski — 2010-08-20 16:55:47 UTC

It has been almost three months since I first released my Prerelease of The jQuery Course. I feel I owe it to everyone to talk about the development of the course. Happily all the news is good news!

Signing on Karl Swedberg as Editor

Over the next month, I will be finishing the course with Karl Swedberg as editor. He is the author of the Learning jQuery Book and also the creator of the Learning jQuery blog. The latest guest post was me writing an exhaustive list on his blog on the ways to learn jQuery. You can see I’ve done my homework ;)

100% Satisfaction

So far, 100% of the people who have bought it have learned and enjoyed the content so far, with only giving one person’s money back because it took me so long to release the rest of the course content. But obviously he liked the content, just wanted more. So, I’ll stick to the fact that 100% satisfied customers is a good thing. I believe the price was right for the 61 minutes of video that is there and the promise of more content in the future is icing on the cake.

“Just a quick email to say I am loving the jQuery course I think you have a great teaching style. The format is also good I like the fact I can ask questions. "

“If you’re on the fence about this, I can recommend it (I purchased it immediately). I found the section on ‘context’ immediately useful. Also, if you’re not using Firebug and working with the console then this first series will be so worth it.”

“Great work; I can’t wait for the rest.”

Most of the content so far is geared towards beginners so I have more up my sleeve for the rest of the course. If you are a beginner, I feel comfortable telling you it is worth the $25. Click here if you want to buy it. For those of you who are fairly advanced in jQuery already, I am planning to unfold some of the missing pages in your jQuery journey during the final release of the course.

Why Are You Still Doing This?

There has been an influx of more training courses out there, frankly they are all over the place by now… even free ones! So you may ask why I am I still doing this? I still believe I have a different take since I’ve done so much work with jQuery on so many different client projects since the very beginnings of jQuery. I’ve known most of the core team members, spoken at most of the official jQuery events and can teach you the philosophies behind why you are using jQuery and what are the practical things you need to know to become successful with jQuery.

Oh, and fun fact.. my jQuery Essentials slideshow became the #1 most favorited slideshow on slideshare for jQuery.

Release Date of The jQuery Course

Over the next month I will be rerecording a few things based on some feedback. The introduction section needs to cover more and I need to re-film the entrance (people said I sound mad, lol). Also people said it would be helpful to have better transitions instead of quickly switching topics. There was no really bad feedback though, so like I said everyone has learned something from it. I truly believe I have a lot of great things to teach you.. so onward!!

The release date for the final course has been set for mid next month.

Increase Productivity Through the Mission

Marc Grabanski — 2010-08-12 20:53:55 UTC

One area a lot of us developers like to worry about is personal productivity tools. Sometimes this can be a good area to explore, but in general, I think about all the time I’ve wasted on trying out all these things.

Reasons for Trying Out New Productivity Tools

A. I like trying new things (which is probably just fine)
B. My current tool is insufficient
or unfortunately more often I think it is probably C. I’ve usually lost site of the underlying driving factors — which I’m referring to as “The Mission”.

The Key to Productivity

The first, biggest key to productivity is to define your underlying philosophy of why you do what you do.. and what you love. What you want to be the best at and what areas you want to grow in. You will discover that the best tools for the job will come to you through discovery when you feel you need something better. Write out these things and refer to it often as, “The Mission” or the driving force behind what you are doing.

Low Level Task Management

Task management is a low-level function. Between using gmail labels such a “notifications, open conversations, open work (new oportunities) and todo” combined with a GTD app pretty much solve organizing importance on a task and conversational level. The tools are in place to solve this low-level action of processing through tasks.

High Level “Why” Finding

The time I spend thinking about the underlying philosophies is actually solving things a much higher level than the applications and tools.

If you want to be more productive, find out why you are doing it. If you get that far then if you find yourself consistently seeking the right productivity tools then you probably are spending your time on the wrong thing and have worn out your passions and lost sight of the “why” and are now focusing on the “how” when time would be better spend deriving passion from the why.

Productivity Tools

I think when I’m most productive I’m thinking less about my tools and more about what I want to accomplish. My tools revert to a piece of paper or whiteboard and I forget to use all my tools that I was using when I lost sight of the “why”. Tools such as GTD tools are great on a per-task basis, but don’t let them take your sight off the overall mission.

Conclusion

Prioritize your actions according to the mission.

Next time you are wasiting time on your tools, try saying this: “Hey tool! Get behind my mission or else your new home will be in the trash bin!” Then go sip some tea and cultivate your passions derived from the underlying mission. After that it will be much easier to produce in the area you are thinking about.

Paul Graham has a great writeup that taps on the “why” side of the fence titled, Ideas for Statups

Organizing and Sharing Knowledge

Marc Grabanski — 2010-08-05 17:57:23 UTC

This article is the all-encompassing thought train of me wrestling with the overarching concept of organizing and sharing knowledge online. I’m building an application that deals with these very concepts, so consider this market research that you get to listen to and take part in via the comments.

Mentioned Services

If you are just a passer-by person then check out these services, I go into more detail about their use below.

Link sharing: Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Twitter and New Digg
Read links later: Instapaper and Read It Later
Link curation: Chirp links
Blogging: WordPress, Blogger and Tumbler
Image sharing: Facebook, Google Picasa and Flickr
Audio Sharing: Sound Cloud, Last.fm and Myspace
Video sharing: YouTube and Vimeo
Document syncing and selective sharing: Dropbox
Document sharing: Scribd, Docstoc and Slideshare
Groups of Documents Sharing: Drop.io
Desktop to Web: Cloud App and Skitch
Personal organization and pseudo sharing: Google Notebook and Evernote

What do we organize and share online?

There are a few things that a person shares online. When I think of the types of things I share, they are: links, original written content, documents, images, video and music. I rarely share music and with videos I upload them to YouTube and share them with a link. So, for me what I want to really tackle is sharing links, images, writings and documents.

What do we do with links?

When I think about how a person creates and shares links, Twitter, blogging and Delicious come to mind. Delicious is probably more a personal bookmark management system that is synced online than it is sharing, but I do know people who publish the RSS feed of their bookmarks online. Also, delicious popular is a good way to find popularly bookmarked links. So this service is incredibly important for organizing links. It must be considered the default way to use bookmarks aside from simply bookmarking in the browser.

Another link sharing service that comes to mind is Digg and Reddit. These are all link sharing services at heart, with the added feature of voting them up and commenting on the links. Really, I don’t see any difference between digg and delicious other than where the focus is put on. Digg was created as a social news site. Well, delicious could have been the same thing had they had commenting, voting and a home page that featured it.

Twitter is also great for sharing links, but only one link at a time. I now find more useful links through twitter than anywhere else at this point throughout each day. Simply because I follow people who share content that is interesting to me. Currently there is no way to vote up the usefulness of a tweet, but in reality you are voting on the usefulness of all tweets by a single person with your follow.

There is no way to really go back and find the best links through twitter other than looking at number of retweets, so I see there is room for someone to create a better service around links and link discovery for twitter — Chirp links is trying to do this. Then there is the new Digg which is trying to be social sharing of useful links, basically Twitter without the middle noise.

The final point way we deal with links is to save them to read later. Instapaper and Read It Later are two great services for this.

What do we do with writings?

Blogging (WordPress and Blogger) is the most prevalent way to share your own writings online. The shortened (micro blogging) form of this is Twitter, which is obviously picking up a ton of steam.

Tumbler sits right in the middle of Twitter and Blogging. I don’t really see it as blogging, I see it more as simplified sharing. I know there are people who use Tumbler to blog, but more often I just see it as a way to drop in a link and write a paragraph about it. That is what almost all tumbler blogs I see are. A little longer than Twitter, but less than a traditional blog.

Sharing collaborative writings

The way many people are able to write together is usually through a wiki. Wikis are great for documenting open source projects. jQuery uses a wiki and so does most projects. It just a natural way to see edits that a group of people are making to a series of writings.

A relatively new way of sharing writings is to publish it on github. With github, anyone can download that content, make edits and submit a pull request. The github team used this to have their ebook translated into a ton of languages.

What do we do with images?

Facebook, I believe, has become the primary source of sharing images online. I think it has pretty much become a photo sharing website at this point with the ability to play social games as well. Flickr is specifically for photo sharing and has received tremendous growth. I hear Google’s Picasa is great for photo sharing as well.

How do we share audio?

I’m not too familiar with audio sharing, but I imagine myspace is the leader. I’ve been hearing a lot about Sound Cloud as well. Itunes would be the biggest paid audio player. Last.fm is great for sharing your musical preferences with others.

How do we share video?

Of course YouTube and Vimeo are huge players in the video sharing space. There is a new class of applications for sharing paid videos, but those services are far less mature than YouTube and Vimeo.

What do we do with documents?

First and foremost I think of Dropbox (referral link, I get extra storage if you sign up) when I think of documents. With dropbox, you can keep your files up to sync and share folders with other people. This is more of an organizing activity though and not really for public sharing.

Of course Google Docs comes to mind again, this is a great service for both storing and editing documents. But again, I don’t see people tweeting out google doc links. Usually it is shared on a private mailing list or by email.

Drop.io is great for taking a bunch of documents, putting them in a group and sharing folders online. I kind of see it as a public Dropbox. Except there is no way to keep your drop.io folders synced on your desktop. Everything is done through a web app. I have seen drop.io links be shared in blog articles, twitter and via email.

The most prevalent ways of sharing documents would be Scribd, Docstoc and I’d also include Slideshare in this as well. The great thing about these services is that you can preview and download a page at a time rather than having to store the entire document on your computer at one time. There is also the social aspects as well. I see people embedding and sharing scribd and slideshare links quite often.

The final way is email which is very personal, has no collaboration aspects.. it is mostly for historical reference and one-offs.

Personally managing all of these things

Google Notebook and Evernote both come to mind when I think of organizing information. Both applications have the ability to write notes, organize them into notebooks and use a rich text editor to edit the contents. They both feature searching across all your notes. Google Notebook doesn’t allow you to upload documents, but Evernote does. Evernote also OCRs your images to extract text from pictures you take. Very useful for mobile. I believe Google Goggles is also doing something similar. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google Goggles integrated with Google Notebook soon.

“When publishing a notebook that contains content from websites, please remember to respect the hard work (and legal rights) of the people that created the content. Publishing a notebook is the same as creating your own web page — don’t include content in your notebook that you couldn’t legally publish on your own webpage.”

You can take a Google Notebook or Evernote Notebook and share it online. It converts that notebook to a webpage. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of these links online.

Sharing things from your desktop

There are only a few services that let you share things from your desktop. The Mac-only Cloud App is probably the only service out there like this. You can just drop in a file, link, anything and it publishes out to a publicly available shared link. You can make each thing public or private.

Skitch is worth mentioning too, because for images you can edit and then share them quickly.

Building the future of organizing and sharing

Over the last eight months I’ve tried to hash out all of these ways of sharing and making knowledge available to be shared with others. The concept of sharing knowledge with each other is incredibly important to me. I did create a little prototype that was shown to some angel investors and they gave me funding for round two. Hopefully in a month or so the team I have put together for this can have a publicly available way to share and organize information as the first step of many towards making a better way to organize your information and share it with the people that you want to share with.

Groovy JSON String Escape Quote Nightmare

Marc Grabanski — 2010-07-28 20:00:39 UTC

The project I’m working on at the moment is in Groovy. In order to set JSON on page load, you have to escape either single quotes or double quotes.

var myJSON = 'this is the cat\'s first day in Marc\'s house'; // JavaScript string

With groovy, you can cast something as JSON and set it to the view pretty easily.

// setting JSON object to view in grails
def myObject = [
  id: id,
  foo: foo
]
[myObject: myObject as JSON]

In the view, you can use jQuery’s parseJSON method to set the myJSON object from your server-side method.

// turning Groovy JSON object into JavaScript JSON in view
var myJSON = $.parseJSON('${myObject}');

The problem comes when you have single quotes inside that JSON string.

“Strings are CON-FUSE-ING in groovy- I just want to print a dang backslash-quote “\’” nope try again.. ‘\\’" ..nope “\\\’” ..nope.. ‘\\\\’’ ..?" – 2AM Tweet frustration

I looked up countless articles, and found out that it is not actually strings that are a deal. With Groovy, you have to use four slashes s.replaceAll("'", "\\\\'"). See, Slashy Strings in Groovy. This is also outlined in a forum thread where people were complaining about Java itself, String.replaceAll troubles with regEx.

This is great if you want to print out a normal string:

// string replace single quote with backslash-quote in groovy
def myString = " the dog's tail is being chased more' quotes' 09' 10' "
myString = myString.replaceAll("'", "\\\\'")

But won’t work is if you try to cast that object as JSON. I tried to do this inside an object and cast it as JSON then the once I set it to the view, \’ doesn’t print out.

If you have a solution for this great, but I solved my problem by getting the JSON via a simple AJAX $.get request.

Why Aren't More Developers Building Businesses?

Marc Grabanski — 2010-07-21 20:56:26 UTC

Are you wanting to venture out to implement a new business idea?

Every good developer has their own independent visions, but even when visions line up developers chose to build independently instead of together. College students don’t seem to have this problem, but anyone seasoned in their career will only work for money or so it seems. The risk is gone, the emotion, the drive, the opportunism to create something new that drives new businesses goes away. Instead it becomes all of us making money for other people which is much safer.

Businesses Require Money to Exist

A business does need to make money to survive, so maybe we just don’t have financial literacy or what it takes to hack it building software that makes money? Maybe we don’t care about that so we just all work in safety coding open source together despite wanting our 9-5 time back.

Developers Working Together to Build Businesses

Here’s a question that I’ve often wondered: What would it take for great developers to be inspired working together building their own business? Why be restrained by someone else’s business mandating your salary rate, your hours, your office and ultimately your life? What would it take for us to work together for a common goal and build the companies and the lifestyle we all dream of?

I think Build It with Me is stepping in the right direction towards building things together, I don’t have a conclusive answer to this, just wondering your thoughts.