Doug Neiner

This is the video of my presentation titled jQuery: Nuts, Bolts...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:04:24 -0500

This is the video of my presentation titled jQuery: Nuts, Bolts and Bling. The slides are available on Speaker Deck, and the code is available on Github.

Here are the slides from my presentation at the Front End Design...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:09:46 -0400

Here are the slides from my presentation at the Front End Design Conference. Additionally, I posted the source code to Github for the live coding portion of the presentation.

Here is the video from the jQuery Boston conference of 2010....

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:15:06 -0500

Here is the video from the jQuery Boston conference of 2010. You’ll need the slides to watch along with the video.

jQuery Panel for Cold Fusion Devs

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:56:56 -0500

jQuery Panel for Cold Fusion Devs:

I am taking part in a jQuery discussion panel tomorrow (Feb 8, 2011). Please join in if you can make it. The topic centers around what jQuery means for server side developers. I will be joining Raymond Camden, Ben Nadel and fellow jQuery Team Member Rey Bango. It should be a blast!

Here are the slides for the talk I presented at jQuery...

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 14:19:20 -0400

Here are the slides for the talk I presented at jQuery Conference. Video should be available at a later date. Thanks again to everyone who provided feedback on Speaker Rate and all those who attended my talk!

I asked my son, “What is the best JavaScript Framework in...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 11:12:39 -0400

I asked my son, “What is the best JavaScript Framework in the World?” I think you will love his response. Go jQuery!

First Days at Church

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:33:36 -0400

My mom has taken a picture of each of my kids on their first day in church. Its neat to see 1) how little they are and 2) How much of how Cody looks today was visible when he was just a few weeks old!

Cody’s First Day

Ruby’s First Day

Olivia’s First Day

So happy to welcome Olivia Rose Neiner to our family! Follow the...

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:41:25 -0400

So happy to welcome Olivia Rose Neiner to our family! Follow the link to see some photos from today.

Olivia Rose Set (by Douglas Neiner)

CSS Olympic Logo

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:57:44 -0400

Inspired by Justin Sepulveda’s CSS Logos and this post on the new Design Informer Forums, I decided to try my hand at creating the Olympic Rings with just CSS and HTML. I realize it is simple, but it was fun to figure out the layering and how to do it with just a few elements. After another helpful suggestion from Justin, I changed the measurements to use ems so it could be resized easily. Try sliding the jQuery UI slider back and forth to change the size of the logo!

Now that you are all excited, click on through to view the CSS logo! Remember, you need to use a modern browser that supports border-radius. This will look really funny in IE < 8! If it doesn’t look like the picture below, try a different browser!

Quick thoughts on GPL and WordPress

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:15:00 -0400

This post is more about the GPL than WordPress, but here is my 2¢: Matt may be right in his understanding of the GPL. He is legally right to enforce it. That doesn’t mean I agree with the original choice to use the GPL or his choice to enforce it.

Here is my open-source philosophy: “I share code and contribute because I love it. I get joy from people using my code. If you can make money off my code, awesome!*”

Is it naive to think others should feel this same way about the code they release?

Up until now, any code I have released is dual licensed under MIT/GPL following the lead of jQuery. I don’t think I will change this practice, but I might put a disclaimer in that GPL is included only so it doesn’t limit those who have to use it and the MIT is my preferred license.

I fundamentally stand against a few philosophies of the GPL, but the most glaring to me are these (completely paraphrasing): “You can sell this software, but it must remain free.” and “Why don’t you sell support for your free product!”

Lets take them one at a time:

“You can sell free software” This one is great from a business perspective. Work really really hard to build something, then sell it…. once. The guy that buys it, uploads it and distributes it for free. Ok, now forget the business perspective: I would lose sleep at night selling people something they can easily get for free. There are lots of things in this world people would rather pay for than do themselves, but free software is pretty straight forward. Buying a theme is just as easy as downloading it somewhere else for free. I would feel like a complete cheat to sell free software, even if I called it a “distribution charge.”

“Give the product away, but sell support.” Ok, again, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The work effort of selling 1 digital product or 100,000 digital products is not a lot different in this day and age. However, providing paid support to 1 person or 100,000 people takes a drastically different amount of time. Furthermore, anyone could technically provide support for your product. So you take all the time to build a product, release it, then compete to make money off it.

Paid Support models obviously work (for broadly accepted technologies) and whole industries can be built off them. My point is this: for a small time person building a product to sell, I think they will do far better in hard cash and time spent from a product sale than supporting that same product as the only source of income from it.

* To those who follow my Twitter stream closely, you will remember when I tweeted that I had no problem with paid WP themes, but I did with paid jQuery plugins. Obviously that is hypocritical of me. I like everything jQuery to be free I guess… haha. If you sell jQuery plugins, GO FOR IT! Thats why the MIT license is so great.

For the people who love seeing kids with food all over their...

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:10:53 -0400

For the people who love seeing kids with food all over their faces… this is for you!

Tab Closing Woes

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:15:04 -0400

I switched to Google Chrome a number of months ago, and I absolutely love it. I wish there was slightly better integration of the worlds best tool, 1Password, but it gets better all the time.

One beef I have with it is the concept of recently closed tabs. For me the workflow goes something like this:

“Wow I have a lot of tabs open….” CMD+W….

CMD+W, CMD+W, CMD+W, CMD+W, CMD+W, CMD+W

“Oh, no! I didn’t mean to close that tab!”

History > Recently Closed > My Closed Page

“Phew! its back!”

“Oh, no! What happened to the page I was on!”

#fail

That entire conversation in my head can be summed up with: Opening a Recently Closed tab should open it in a new tab, not over the one you have open.

A fantastic video by Yehuda Katz on how he got started in the...

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:40:16 -0400

A fantastic video by Yehuda Katz on how he got started in the Ruby on Rails community. It is a very encouraging video for people wanting to get involved in open source (and specifically Ruby on Rails).

Tabs vs. Spaces

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:25:00 -0400

First off, quick definition: I am referring to the difference between using Tab Characters and Space Characters. Many editors support using the Tab key to insert either a tab character or a certain number of spaces.

Tab Character: Created by using the Tab key, and inserts a single character whose length depends on the settings of the code editor. Its length can vary from editor to editor.

Space Character: Created by using either the Space bar, or the Tab key with Soft Tabs enabled. One character per space, and is a set length. It will always be equal to one character in length.

Soft Tabs: Soft Tabs are created by using the Tab Key, but in reality only insert a set number of Space Characters instead. So a Soft Tab with a setting of 4 will insert Four space characters instead of one tab character when you press the Tab key.

Lets take a quick look at two images. The first shows a PHP function in an editor that has been configured to use Hard Tabs (single character per tab), equal to 4 spaces:

Now, lets look at the same file when opened on a computer/editor that has the preference set that a Hard Tab should display as two characters instead of four. Nothing lines up anymore!:

Here are some reasons for using Spaces (Specifically 2 space indents) instead of Tabs:

Consistent code viewing on any platform: web, desktop or print
Code takes up less horizontal space, allowing more to be read at one time
It makes code easy to copy and paste for online discussion and sharing since most online viewers render Tab Characters as 4 spaces or more.

One closing thought: This is monospaced code, not MS Word. Variable width tab characters have no place here. Type what you mean, and mean it. Flexibility here only brings confusion.

TextMate: In TextMate I have it set to 2 space tabs, and Soft Tabs on (which tells TM to use spaces instead of real tab characters). This drop down is in the footer in each TextMate window:

Forcing Upgrades

Thu, 06 May 2010 10:43:49 -0400

Anyone who releases versioned software can take a hint from Adobe, and force upgrades on your users by making the backwards compatibility next to impossible:

Note: To open the InDesign CS5 document in InDesign CS3, open the exported IDML file in InDesign CS4, save it and export it to InDesign CS3 Interchange (INX), and then open the exported INX file in InDesign CS3. Make sure that all InDesign versions are up to date.

via Save backwards to the previous InDesign version

You have got to be kidding me! If you need to go to CS3, why would you have CS4 still hanging around?

Note: I realize CS3 is two versions back now, but going from InDesign to any previous version is difficult even if going just one version back. I plan to upgrade to CS5, but never went to CS4 because the many of the new features were ‘meh’ in my opinion and didn’t warrant the cost.

Here are the slides from my presentation at the jQuery San...

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:39:06 -0400

Here are the slides from my presentation at the jQuery San Francisco Bay Area Conference. For those wanting the sample project I demoed, you can find it on github.

A fun photo from my presentation at jQCon. The lapel mic had a...

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:49:25 -0400

A fun photo from my presentation at jQCon. The lapel mic had a tan cord, so it really stands out!

My Session at jQCon (by doug.neiner)

Here is a quick preview of my room here at the conference. I...

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:17:18 -0400

Here is a quick preview of my room here at the conference. I love it and think its awesome… but for those that think this normal… remember, I don’t travel much :)

Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:12:10 -0400

Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces:

This article has been out for a while, but I just glanced through it again and it is really a gold mine for iPhone and iPad (as well as website) developers/designers. Definitely worth a read.

There's no such thing as a "JSON Object"

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:17:07 -0500

There's no such thing as a "JSON Object":

A fun, but important read. Terminology is important when discussing code among programmers, and “JSON Objects” are no different.