This nifty resource loader, which is only 1.7KB minified and gzipped, is bundled with Modernizer and is great for loading polyfills, preloading or “priming” the user’s cache, or as a simple asynchronous resources loader / filter! You can read up more here.

If you’re a preprocessor user who prefers to create his or her own CSS3 mixins, then fantastic; however, otherwise, are some of you not using these services? If so, why not? It’s understandable that Firefox and Microsoft may feel forced into supporting the webkit prefix for some properties, despite their better judgment. Particularly for older and smaller projects, we’re not always great about updating the stylesheets as needed. This is precisely why prefixed properties have h

Many developers tend to write JavaScript from a procedural or functional point of view, and often neglect to consider the natural tendencies offered in view-based development approaches and parallel instantiation (creating a new instance of the view as we create a new instance of a JavaScript object corresponding to that view) when working in MVC Frameworks. It’s often the case that I run into JavaScript files that are just one method after another. Though this behavior works, and is com

Asynchronous loading doesn’t come without its caveats, though. When scripts are loaded the traditional way, inline code is not parsed or executed until the external scripts are fully loaded, sequentially. This is not the case with asynchronous loading. In fact, inline scripts will usually parse / execute while the scripts are still being downloaded. In like manner, the browser is also downloading resources and rendering the page as the scripts are being loaded. Thus, we can arrive at

We have seen how Memcached can be used to speed up your website and limit your database load. Our example above was based on PHP and MySQL because these techologies are widely deployed, but this principle is universal and works just the same with many other technologies : C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, .Net, MySQL, Postgres, Erlang, Lua, Lisp, Cold Fusion, Ocaml and io are listed along with PHP on the official Memcached wiki.

The recently re-launched Tuts+ Premium is a service that provides top-tier training in a variety of creative fields. Whether you prefer books, visual training, or in depth tutorials, we have you covered. While we unfortunately can’t afford to provide the service for free, it’s only $19 a month – less than you’d spend on dinner.

If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with

Sometimes, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by how much there is to learn in this industry. If jQuery happens to be on your personal “need to learn soon” list, then I’m happy to announce my new course: “Learn jQuery in 30 Days”. If you’ll give me fifteen minutes a day for the next month, I’ll help you become a jQuery pro – and it’s free!

IcedCoffeeScript is a fork of CoffeeScript. It is superset of the CoffeeScript language. The iced interpreter is a drop-in replacement for the standard coffee interpreter since it will interpret all existing CoffeeScript programs. IcedCoffeeScript (ICS) adds two new keywords: await and defer. These additions simply and powerfully streamline asynchronous control flow, both on the server and on the browser.

WebMock is a Ruby mocking library that is used to mock (or stub) http requests. In other words, it allows you to simulate any HTTP request without actually making one. The primary advantage to this is being able to develop and test against any HTTP service without needing the service itself and without incurring in related issues (like API limits, IP restrictions and such).VCR is a complementary tool that records any real http request and creates a fixture, a file that contains all the needed da

factory_girl provides a framework and DSL for defining and using factories – less error-prone, more explicit, and all-around easier to work with than fixtures. It has straightforward definition syntax, support for multiple build strategies (saved instances, unsaved instances, attribute hashes, and stubbed objects), and support for multiple factories for the same class (user, admin_user, and so on), including factory inheritance.

The ->rowCount() method returns an integer indicating the number of rows affected by an operation. In at least one known version of PDO, according to [this bug report](http://bugs.php.net/40822) the method does not work with select statements. If you’re having this problem, and can’t upgrade PHP, you could get the number of rows with the following:

Recently, Douglas Crockford released a neat tool that makes the process of developing and testing your JavaScript a bit easier. Interested in learning more? Watch today’s quick tip to find out!

Usually your web server will use one of these modules depending on which version of Apache is in use. Generally, you will know this beforehand, but if you are creating a generic .htaccess file that you can use on a variety of sites, or which you may share with other people and therefore you don't know which modules may be in use, you may wish to use both of the above blocks of code wrapped in directives so that the correct module is used and the server doesn't throw a 500 error if we try to con

This introduces a pretty cool feature of EnhancePHP: scenarios. We want to test a bunch of non-email addresses to make sure our method will return false. By creating a scenario, we essentially wrap an instance of our class in some EnhancePHP goodness, are write much less code to test all our non-addresses. That’s what $val_wrapper is: a modified instance of our Validation class. Then, $val_email is the scenario object, somewhat like a shortcut to the validate_email method.