I almost can't believe it, but the latest release of Doodlekit, my free website builder is live. We're busy trying to get the word out, but I wanted to showcase some of the interesting challenges we had to solve in our new templating engine....
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It has been a long time coming, but the latest release of Doodlekit is almost ready for production. For me, this is definitely the most exciting release of our free website builder yet. The main focus has been on completely new template framework that allows our customers to finely tune every detail of their website design. In addition, there are a ton of new features as well a...
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I wanted to be able to have variable named arguments, with the last being a callback. This isn't hard to do with straight Javascript, but is rather verbose.
filter: function() {
file = arguments[0]
format = arguments[1]
profile = arguments[1]
callback = arguments[argument.length-1]
// Now you can do this
filter(myFile, myFormat, myProfile, function() { })
// Or thi...
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If you're getting started with Node.js, like I am, chances are you're having a hard time grokking asynchronous workflows. I'm typically a "just dive right in and kick it till it works" kind of guy, but I've been trying to discipline myself a little more and do some planning. After trying some different techniques I found sequence diagrams to be very...
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It's very easy to tell Rails to look for a layout in a different location from default, example...
render :layout => '/path/to/layouts/my_layout'
There's one caveat, the word "layouts" must be in the path. This is probably fine for most cases, but I had a special case. After digging through the Rails source I finally found a solution. T...
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I'm really excited about this new project I'm working on. LiveOn is a Kansas City based Startup developing a site that helps people capture and share memories with their family today, and preserves them for future generations. Check out the LiveOn Video on the homepage. It's an awesome idea and we're building some great technology behind it. We've already bu...
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One thing that Rails isn't particularly good at is organization of large projects. There's one controllers directory, one models directory, etc. As Doodlekit started to grow I tried to find ways to keep this in check. I've been using Engines for a couple of years and I've found it way to cumbersome for just organizing code. I looked into Namespacing, but I don't want to hav...
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We're working on some cool new image management tools for Doodlekit and one small feature we wanted to add was number re-ordering, like you can do in your Netflix queue.Maybe I'm dense but it took me quite a while to get the logic down for this and I went through a number of different revisions before I nailed it. I thought I'd post it here just incase anyone is looking for it, and for feedb...
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Wanted to share this little snippet that lets you easily center Elements vertically and horizontally in the viewport.Once you add the code you can call it like so...$('my_div').centerVertically();$('my_div').centerHorizontally();The code is paste below and also on Gist.
...
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New features coming in HTML5 and CSS3 represent a sigh of relief for people using kludgey code and hacks to get things working the way you want. However, there's one element that you can find on almost every single web app that's getting no attention, the File Input. In particular there's no standardization on what it should look like or how you can style it. It seems it's time for the...
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Garbage Burrito!
An online internet web blog by Ben Kittrell
Blog
Doodlekit 2.0
New Doodlekit Release in 2013
Variable Arguments with Callback in CoffeeScript
Sequence Diagrams for Asynchronous Flows in Node.js
Putting your layouts in a non "layouts" directory in Rails
New Project - LiveOn.com
Organizing Large Rails Projects, the Simple Way
Re-order Multiple Items by Number
Center Elements Horizontally and Vertically with Prototype
Calling for a better HTML File Input