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Codecademy teaches JavaScript programming through the browser: follow instructions, type in code, move on to the next step. This is similar to the (slightly more amusing) Rails for Zombies.

Browser-based code classes look promising for classroom teachers: there’s no need to install compilers or even text editors, making this environment much easier to set up in a lab. Students can also continue their work easily at home, with (some level of) instant feedback from the built-in help system.

The associated Hacker News post has some interesting suggestions, and the comments from non-programmers about the course’s difficulty can be quite enlightening to anyone trying to teach a programming course.

Chosen is a JavaScript plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly.

A JavaScript spinner. No images, external CSS, resolution independent, smaller than an animated GIF, and even runs on IE6.

For future reference: a pretty web-based countdown timer by Type/Code, potentially useful for the classroom.

Via.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

No IE7/8 support yet, but it’s been promised. More activity on their Github page, where someone’s already made a Sass fork (it’s LESS-based).

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched — but today there’s no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.

Article from 2006, still relevant today. Ah, BASIC.

This article on the (new?) The Sass Way blog describes how you can “pre-stack” parent selectors in Sass. In other words, as you’re working on a selector, you can style a parent selector above it using Sass’s nested syntax.

This is great when styling for IE with Paul Irish / HTML5 Boilerplate’s conditional IE classes — for an element misbehaving in, say, IE7:

.item {
  float: left;
  margin: 1em;
  .ie7 & {
    display: none; // WTF IE SCREW YOUUUU
  }
}

(Marginally related: When looking for a “go away, IE6 users” message for our new GuestDay web app, we came across Microsoft’s IE6 Countdown, which currently pegs Singapore at only 3.1% IE6 usage. Not bad.)

(Yes, this is how we do launch announcements — in a footnote of a marginally related post.)

Just noticed that Middleman, my preferred static site framework, got a major update and its own website. What it is:

• Ruby gem running off Sinatra
• Allows templates, partials and creates pretty URLs
• Lets you use trendy-ass languages like Haml (boo), Sass (yay), CoffeeScript (wha?) and Markdown (all hail Lord Gruber)
• Supports great tools that have become essentials in my web development workflow: HTML5 Boilerplate, LiveReload, Pow via Rack, and Compass
• And a bunch of other features I should probably be using. As with the HTML5 Boilerplate, this is a large part of its appeal — discovering new tools and best practices.

First version was a bit iffy here and there, but the developer was very responsive (even after having taken a break from the project). Now super awesome, highly recommended, blah blah.