Did you ever wondered how the call-to-action widgets work? You know, those little buttons for sharing content in the social networks. Very often they are distributed as iframes but sometimes we have to copy/paste script tags. And the instructions are "Place the following code where you want the button to appear". But if that's a script tag how it knows where to inject the button? The goal of this article is to give you an answer on this question.

I'm continuing to experiment with React and TypeScript. The weekend-long project this time was a Covid-19 data tracker. In this blog post I will share how I built c19stats.now.sh. I exposed the data as a public API at the same URL. I guess you, as many other people, follow the situation so you may want to glue your fingers on the keyboard and create something useful around the data. I got lots of fun playing with the diagrams.

I'm now actively working on a VSCode extension. I started it as a theme but then decided to add some more features. Like for example a tin line on the left side of the editor marking the current function scope. In order to do that I had to analyze the current file's code and find the lines that are included in that scope. The obvious approach will be to translate the code to AST and then traverse the tree finding the information that I need. This however will require the usage of a language server which now I don't want to deal with. So I decided to explore a brute force approach. Looping over the string characters and finding balanced matches. I quickly wrapped it into a library. I called it Pairify. It consumes text and returns an array of pairs. This blog post will show you how it works.

2020 for me started with the release of several OS projects. Two of them reached 100 stars in a week and I was thinking that would be nice sharing my workflow. Not like it is working every time, absolutely not, but leads to some good results.

The story follows a secret society whose purpose is to find people who don’t deserve to live and to kill them with their thoughts. The tension between the pessimistic protagonist and the liaison of the secret society comes to a head in a riveting twist.

Първия епизод за 2018 е с Мариан и Павел. Поговорихме си за Sashido.io, инфраструктури, наемане на хора и още нещо :)

If you are writing React applications you probably know about higher order components or render props (which by the way I think is kind of a form of higher order component pattern). In both cases we have a component that encapsulates logic and passes props down to children. Recently at work we came to the idea that we may push this further and represent some functionalities which are out of React in the same fashion - with a single tag in our components tree.

One of the things that I really like at work is the fact that we spend time in research tickets. We have unknowns and we make a research to find out more information on particular topic. We then base our decisions on the results. Recently we had to decide whether to use an <iframe> for a third party widget development. I feel that the collected information may be handy to someone else so I decided to write it down here.

Every front-end developer that starts reading about CSS preprocessors thinks “Oh, finally variables in CSS". Indeed, the ability to create and use variables in CSS makes our code much more flexible. However, I think that there is no need to use a preprocessor to create flexible stylesheets.

It's again Sunday and I'm planning to watch talks. Last week few conferences shared their recordings. I got some nice videos from Twitter and again my bookmarks bar is full with YouTube and Vimeo links. So, it's time to clear it a bit and make room for the next weekend. Here is my plan:

We all know what responsive means nowadays. We, as developers, normally develop responsive applications. There is a dozen of instruments helping us achieving our goals. Some of us use extensions and even pay for them. However, I'm using one thing - Google Chrome browser. In this article, we will see what the Chrome's capabilities for testing responsiveness are.

Before a couple of weeks I published Techy. It's a flat CMS based on Node.js and Markdown. I made it because I wanted to write my articles in Markdown format and avoid the annoying publishing workflow which I'm using now. I feel that it's not very clear how Techy works and decided to create a simple blog illustrating the processes.

If you believe in responsive design you probably use a lot of media queries. That's a CSS feature which gives us the power to add something like if statements. We are able to apply rules only if the current page meets certain conditions. In this article I'll show you how I use media queries in JavaScript.

I'm currently working on the official site of AbsurdJS. There are a lot of code samples out there and I wanted to present them in JSBins.

I'm currently working on a JavaScript application which is using the facebook API. There are some things which I need to pass from one page to the other. So, I decided to use cookies. The storing works like a charm, but the deleting doesn't. I needed one hour to find the exact problem.

I had a chance to make a talk on TarnovoConf 2013. My topic was "CSS for developers". The videos are now available in YouTube.

The mixins in SASS are really helpful. Here is something really short which I just start using. It's a mixin which I apply on the grid's container.

These days I'm working on this little thing. It's a CSS micro framework following atomic concept. My preprocessor of choice is SASS. That's why I wrote several articles on this subject. Today's post is about media queries mixin.

I used LESS a lot. These days I decided to try SASS and to be honest it's a better choice for CSS preprocessor. It just gives me more functionalities and better control on my code. There are few instruments for architecting your CSS logic - @mixin, @extend and placeholders. However there are differences between them and specific use cases.

The first challenge, was something which I was thinking about a lot these days. The next one is actually a well known common task, but it is still difficult. In every project we have different types of layouts. Of course there are some patterns. The idea today is to implement them with pure CSS.

Nowadays is really difficult to be up to date with the latest technologies, concepts or tools. There are several ways to accomplish this. You could use RSS, check blogs regularly or follow as many people as possible in Twitter/Facebook. My way is to watch videos from various conferences.

That's first of (I hope) many posts with such an idea. Problems solved with pure CSS. No JavaScript.

By definition :before and :after are CSS pseudo elements. You can use them to insert something before or after the content of an element. There are some great articles giving the basics, but I wanted to write down a blog post for the real use cases. Or, at least, to show what I'm using them for.

I'm living in Varna, Bulgaria. Last year we had a great conference called VarnaConf. This year the guys behind it decided to make it again and even better - a series of conferences around my country. I had the chance to make a talk.

I'm currently working on a Google Chrome extension and I need to run a JavaScript in the context of the current page. The obvious choice for such a logic is the content script. However it is not so easy, because the content script has an access only to the DOM of the current page. It can't run global functions or use global objects.

It's a little big difficult for me to write long articles. This one is maybe the longest, which I ever wrote :) It collects my experience with responsive design. I believe that the ideas described in the material are important for our work as web designer and developers. David Walsh was really kind by publishing the article on his blog. You can find it here http://davidwalsh.name/design-responsively.

Front-Trends is one of the best conferences in Europe. It's based in Poland and it's happening every year. I watched all the videos from the previous editions and I could say that it's worth it. Some of the biggest names in front-end development on one stage. All the videos are available in Vimeo, but I decided to post them here as well.

Presentation's slides. All my talks at VarnaLab are available here.

The goal is to achieve a background of the text inside an inline element.

As you may know I just updated my web site. There are five columns which nicely slide up and down on a lower resolution. In other words, accordion-like navigation. Initially I made this effect with JavaScript. But there was a bug and I decided to use pure CSS. I wanted to define everything in CSS classes which to add or remove. The idea wasn't bad except the fact that every column contains dynamic content and I wasn't able to set the exact height when the column is slided down.

NodeJS gives me the ability to write back-end code in one of my favorite languages - JavaScript. It's the perfect technology for real time applications. In this tutorial I'll show you how to build a web chat with Socket.io.

A bunch of cool stuff ;-)

A screencast of the discussion at VarnaLab on subject "Web assets - tips for better organization and performance". The slides are available here.

Today is a day for posting videos. Another interesting conference - JSConf 2012. The videos are available here http://2012.jsconf.us/.

Agile or Agile Development – we hear these words more often these days. But do we really know what it is all about? How can it help us become more effective, while having lots of fun developing software? How can we use it to communicate with business people and make this communication easy and constructive for both sides?http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/the-principles-of-agile-development/

I had a lot of work these days and didn't have time to blog here, but I think that the tips in this article are very useful. The number of Facebook applications is increasing every day. We all know that the testing (debugging) of our code is really important. That's why I decided to share my experience in this area.

Inspired by the article of Dru Kepple I decided to share my experience in Debugging processes in flash/flex enviroment.

One of the big advantages of Flex framework is that you can use a lot of ready components. The DataGrid is really helpful. Especially when you want to list big amount of data and provide ability to edit the information directly in the grid. These days I finished a test task which uses DataGrid and decided to share my experience.

Facebook became one of the most popular social platforms these days. I just finished a flash based game that uses their API and decided to share my experience.

A couple of days ago, I found very useful page about JavaScript called "JavaScript Garden". Check out here.JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language.

I'm absolutely sure that you are using external data in your flash/flex applications. It is a good practice to transfer information in XML format. Most of the projects that I'm working on also use XML and in most of them I have a class that converts the data to JSON object. The problem with this workflow is that the parser's logic is always different because the XML is different. These days I wrote a class that solved this problem and directly converted every given XML file to a JSON object.

Simple way to produce numbered image with PHP. The script uses PHP GD.

I know that you've met this problem. You have a lot of bitmaps in your library and you have to edit all of them one by one. There are several solutions of this problem. One of them is to use JSFL. There is another one - an extension for Flash provided by ArsThanea. Check it out here.

I'm absolutely sure that you've already met this problem. You know, these nice rounded buttons that are provided by the designer. They are really cool, but sometimes the label of the button is so long that you have to resize/scale the image. ActionScript3 provides simple way to solve this issue.

Is there any way to protect your flash work? To be honest the answer is NO. As you probably know everything that is uploaded on a web server and is accessible from a web browser is downloaded to the users' computers and could be found in the temporary directories. Once someone gets your swf file he could use one of the dozen decompilers to reproduce the .fla and .as files. Anyway, there are still some ways to make stealing difficult.

Papervision3D is a perfect tool for the purpose. As you will see such a task needs only few lines of code. To make the example a little bit more interesting we will add additional code to control the rotation of the globe by the mouse.

Yesterday I received host name, user name and password for a MySQL server. I needed to export the data from it. I didn't have access to PHPMyAdmin, I tried to connect to the server by mysql.exe on my PC, but it didn't work. And then I found really good solution - PHPMyAdmin in only one php file. I launched it from my localhost and it works. So if you need to export data or just see it, use Adminer. I also uploaded the file on my server, you can download it from here.