Learning by Hacking

I have always wanted to build my own blog site and this is how I did so in one day. You can download all of the source code here.

The big problem with many tools used for writing (ok, mostly word processors) is that there are too many things you could be doing instead of writing. You could be playing with fonts or styles, futzing for ages trying to make the document look right, work the number styles, headers and footers and resizing the margining.

Or you could be writing.

With Markdown, the font, style, margin and other stuff all comes later. All you have is the text, the basic structure and the options for bold, italic, lists and tables. That’s it! There’s nothing else, so the writer is encouraged to write.

The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. "today's weather in Los Angeles"), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author's hypertext reference must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time.

Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.

CSS is one probably the best bridge between web designers and developers so updates to the CSS spec are very exciting. The W3C recently posted an update to the working Selectors Level 4 spec, and there are many useful updates to be found. Let's have a look at what new CSS selectors and features will be available to us in future browsers!

Git is a version control Swiss army knife. A reliable versatile multipurpose revision control tool whose extraordinary flexibility makes it tricky to learn, let alone master.