HTML

Roger Cheng

Unexpected find: ThingLink and its business

A Science News article online experimented with interactivity not possible in their print edition. It was fairly simple at first glance: when a cursor hovers over certain places in the image, additional information pops up. Seen all over the web, like the little pieces of trivia behind bing.com background picture of the day.

What caught my attention is the link in the corner: “Made with ThingLink, Learn More” What I had thought was a simple piece of HTML is actually a business built around the concept.

A brief exploration found that ThingLink hosts the image (and associated server storage and bandwidth) plus the interactive scripting. The package of content is then available to be served alongside content hosted elsewhere, such as WordPress.com. I can embed a ThingLink right here in this post, if I had something interesting to show.

There’s a basic level of the service for free. To make money, they sell higher tiers with features like customization, branding, and analytic information. I’m ignorant on how this information might be valuable, but ThingLink has an idea: they believe the full set of features is worth over $200/month to some people.

So definitely not just a trivial piece of HTML. It is the tip of the iceberg of a corner of web commerce I didn’t even know existed before today.

Roger Cheng

Peek under the hood of Bootstrap

After completing Codecademy’s “Make a Website” lesson, I decided to go explore a side track to look under the hood of the Bootstrap framework used in the lesson. I’m not going to dive deep (yet), but I wanted to break it down into a short list of names I expect to encounter again as I explore.

The actual run-time components of Bootstrap appears to be two Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files and one JavaScript (JS) file. One of the two CSS files is an optional theme. This confirms that Bootstrap has no client-side requirements, just a web browser that can understand standard CSS & JS files.

On the developer side, things get more interesting.

Grunt is the build system used by the Bootstrap project to build the project code, the documentation files, and run the unit tests.

It’s not clear if the JavaScript files are worked on directly, but the CSS is definitely not. It is done with Less and compiled to CSS. Some parts in the documentation listed “Less/Sass” implying Sass is a similar thing. Maybe look into this later.

Once the product is rebuilt, the JavaScript code is automatically reviewed by JSHint. Then tests are executed in the PhantomJS headless JavaScript runtime orchestrated by QUnit testing framework for JavaScript.

The product documentation pages were generated by Jekyall. Don’t know what the input for Jekyall would look like, but the output is static HTML pages. It claims to be the engine behind GitHub pages, so I know I’ll run into this again when I explore GitHub.

Several package managers were listed. Looks like NPM is required for actually working on Bootstrap itself, though it can also be used for projects consuming Bootstrap. Bower and Composer are two other package managers that seem to apply only to Bootstrap consumers.

That’s the first cut. Some things are still fuzzy, and some things I thought were clear may actually be wrong. We’ll see!

Roger Cheng

Codecademy “Make a Website” notes

I’ve just completed the “Make a Website” lesson on Codecademy, because it made sense to start at the beginning and (re)learn the fundamentals. I knew some simple HTML going in so I had expected part of it to be review and part of it to be new material.

The review part was expected: the lesson went over basic concepts of HTML tags and their hierarchical structure, then went into fine-tuning appearance via CSS.

But the new material was a surprise. After the CSS unit completed teaching about backgrounds and borders and spacing, it promised the next unit is about content and page layout. I thought “OK, good, now we’re getting into stuff I don’t know.”

The next unit began by introducing the Bootstrap framework to manage page layout. It was still an informative and fun interactive lesson, but I was left disappointed by the departure from HTML fundamentals.

It felt incomplete, like a math class that skipped doing addition with pencil and paper and instead going straight to using a calculator. Yeah, I’m probably not going to do it by hand ever again, but I wanted a lesson to teach me how to do it at least once. I would have preferred the lesson to go a bit into doing HTML layout the hard way, then say “Now that you know how to do it the hard way, let’s do it the easy way with Bootstrap.” Doing it both ways would give me a better feel of how HTML layout works and how Bootstrap makes it easier.

The Codecademy lesson worked as advertised, I’ll just have to fill this hole in my knowledge with something else.