Rob Gravelle

What is it?It’s itWhat is it?… – Epic, Faith No More In recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of new terms and expressions to describe all of the new activities that people engage in. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these words are related to technology. For instance, selfie (Oxford dictionary word of the year!), hackerspace, and […]

All of the major browsers come with built-in JavaScript debuggers, but they vary in quality. After trying all of the A-list browsers, I have come to the conclusion that Chrome’s is tops in the area of page testing and debugging. I already gave a general overview of Chrome’s excellent developer tools in the Just One […]

Back in my The AppCache in Action article, I outlined the role of the Manifest file in designating resources for offline viewing. One section, called “FALLBACK”, assigns alternate resources to display if requested ones are unavailable. Experience with the Manifest file bears out that it works very well, in fact, a little too well. This […]

Whether you’re looking to use plaintext, JSON, or XML in your Ajax calls, WordPress (WP) has you covered. With regards to the latter, the WP_Ajax_Response class is your best bet for easy Ajax coding. It takes an Array object and converts it into XML-formatted text, ready to be parsed back on the client-side. As we’ll […]

As we saw in Referencing WordPress’s Native Ajax Handler in JavaScript, Ajax requests go through the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php script. In that article, we learned how to add our JavaScript files to the page using the wp_enqueue_script() and wp_localize_script() functions. Today’s follow-up will describe how to hook your server-side callbacks to the admin-ajax.php script. The Role of […]

Managing CSS3 Vendor Prefixes with Mixins There’s an important best practice of software and Web development called DRY that all developers should follow. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, DRY stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself”. Not limited to software code, CSS stylesheets can also benefit tremendously from DRY. The problem is […]

Just One Reason Why Chrome’s Developer Tools Are The Cat’s Pajamas 11/12/13 There was a time not so long ago that Internet Explorer was the number one browser. Its domination of the browser world was perhaps fueled by its inclusion in Windows operating systems. So strong was its hold on market share that competitors were […]

 10/29/13 Ajax is already built into the core WordPress (WP) administration screens. It’s also the technology behind the auto-save functionality on post and page editing screens. AJAX requests go through wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. Despite the name, you don’t have to have adminsitrator privledges to use it. What you do need is a reference to the admin-ajax.php file. […]

 10/28/13 In the mad rush to bring CSS3 properties to the masses, browser vendors added their own vendor prefixes to the property names as an interim solution. Now, we have a bit of a mess as a result. I’m not going to enumerate all of the ways in which vendor prefixes are bad and how […]

10/18/13 As great as the AppCache is, its use of the Manifest file can be unforgiving, to say the least. When things go wrong, no errors are displayed, everything looks fine while online, but then, should the connection go down, nothing happens! Under such circumstances, your offline applications need to be thoroughly tested before making […]

A DIY Strategy for Dealing with CSS3 Vendor Prefixes 9/19/13 The latest CSS specification, called CSS3, is chock full of dazzling visual effects such as transformations, animation, and box shadows that website owners love to have. After all, the more attractive the site, the more visitors it will draw (everything else being equal of course). […]

 9/12/13 As a Web application architect and developer, an increasing share of my efforts is being directed towards the preservation of functionality in times of network failures. This practice has become so ubiquitous that it even has a name: Offline Applications. Whereas the old desktop apps of the eighties were mostly stand-alone operations with a […]