Moving back to AW.com

Having multiple blogs seemed at first to be a great idea, but keeping up with all of them has proven to be way more involved that I have time for. I'll still be blogging about YUI, but I'm moving everything back to my andrewwooldridge.com blog site. See you next year! Happy Holidays!

Back from YUIConf

I've been pretty quiet lately. However it's not been for lack of work on YUI type things. I was able to submit a proposal to talk at the latest YUIConf and managed to actually do it! Here's my slides if you are interested:

YUI Hidden Gems

View more presentations from Andrew Wooldridge

Getting YUI

The first thing you need to do in order to get started working with YUI is to get it on your page (of course).  There are a surprising number of ways to do this, but let's be straightforward for now and look at the simplest way to include YUI on a page.  Since this has already been covered on the yuilibrary site, let's go there: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/quick-start/

Once you have tried that out, we'll cover a few other ways to include YUI.

Whoah! YQL!

In addition to getting up to speed with YUI, I wanted to give you advance "notice" about another technology you probably have never heard of, but once you try it out, you'll be like Ted going "whoah".

Whoah! YQL!

It's called YQL and it stands for Yahoo Query Language. Here's the site:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

When you combine YUI (client-side) with YQL (server-side) you will begin to build some seriously cool apps. Go check it out today and try out some of the examples. We'll be doing plenty of work with YQL in the process.

Learning Javascript...

In addition to my own "helpful" articles, I plan to send everything I can at you that could help you on your journey of YUI-discovery. Something basic to that would be to know Javascript :) If you are just starting out with that, you might check out Derek Gathright's article on Learning Javascript.

This week: bootstrapping.

This week we'll begin to look at the various ways you can get YUI onto your pages. Given that everything else depends on that, it's a good place to start.

I'm still working out how I want to do these examples, because I want to be able to use them together in an ebook once we are far enough along.  Any comments or suggestions you might have are welcome! I've gotten some ideas already from several YUI folks, including moving this blog to a node.js/markdown format like Wheat.

I'm still on the fence about things like that. I like how blogger basically gives you everything you need to just "get it out there" which is what I'm looking for. I think what I will do is link a github project to this which will list out the examples in a plain text format as I develop them.

Homework

I have a goal of posting "something" every day. At the very least, you and I will be seeing each other on a more or less daily basis - with some kind of interesting YUI news, tip, or script. Each week we'll have a more meaty discussion of some aspect of YUI - more along the lines of a tutorial or a more in-depth explaination of YUI. For this week, we're already at Friday, so I have a homework assignment for you. Go over to the YUI Library site and go click around.

They recently refurbished the site, and it uses all kinds of cool technology under the hood. Perhaps we'll learn to build things like that ourselves.

What I really need from all of you is an opinion on what you want to see from this site. What things about YUI do you want to learn about first?


Send me comments - lots of comments.

Old School

Previous attempts at sharing tips about YUI resulted in a number of blog posts over at my personal blog. (Essentially my "old school".) I also attempted to organize them to some degree for interested readers to check out.  However it merely highlighted my somewhat disorganized (and train of thought) way of approaching this. If you were new at YUI what should you start reading first? What if one post assumed you knew x.y.z but never really mentioned it?

I hope to be much more organized in terms of Indexing my posts and tips. I may not write them in the same order that you read them, but at least you'll be able to follow a more logical pathway through the hedge garden than the one I use to build it.

Using jsfiddle

I'll be using jsfiddle quite a bit in this blog. I have yet to figure out how that will translate when I convert this to ebook format, but perhaps I'll find a way to convert the code easily. To start out, let's see if blogger/blogspot will let me embed jsfiddle code. If it doesn't we'll have a real problem, wont we? If you can see the iframe above, we are using jsFiddle to create a simple "Hello World" view on a page. Let's see if it works! Click on the "result" tab to see things in action. Jsfiddle has YUI 3.4.1 built-in so we can really take off once we get past the basics. For the first few posts we'll talk about how to include YUI in your own pages manually, then we'll just assume that in the jsfiddles...

Welcome to Building It With YUI

Hey there! I'm glad you took a few minutes from your very busy browsing day to stop by. I've had a desire to write something that brings more people to build cool things for the web. It always delights me when someone figures out some new technique, or applies something that was once "experimental" to a practical problem. Over the years I've had a passion for all things javascript, which is the language the web uses to build just about anything you coud imagine: games, apps, shopping carts, kittens with pianos, you name it.

I've come to settle on a single javascript "library" for building things. I know the workings of javascript - and I encourage you to do so as well. It's the "long division" aspect of learning js for the web. If you don't do it the "hard way" first, you'll never appreciate the "easy way" that javascript libraries give you. The library I've settled on is YUI. I used to be a big jQuery fan - and still think it's pretty good for starting out with making things dance on your page. However when you are ready to graduate to true "app" development (and still be able to make things dance on your page) then you should give YUI a try.

I've been trying to wrap my head around YUI for years. I knew about it as I've worked at Yahoo for a long time - even before it was a "public" library. And when it moved from 2.x to 3.x it changed into something quite amazing - beyond just an easy way to do javascript stuff across browsers. It became a way to develop applications using best practices on the web.

It is my sincere hope to use this blog to help you get up to speed on YUI. I really really need your help! If you are just getting started with YUI, or you are an expert looking for some tidbit of knowledge that you may not have already acquired, I want to help you out. Plus, there's no better way to learn something than trying to teach it to someone else.

I'm not an expert in YUI - as I daily realize. But I have been using it long enough to be able to give you some ideas about it, and I hope encourage you to not only try it out, but to actually us it in your projects.

Building things is not a process where you just snap your fingers and things appear fully formed. Instead you have to add layers and layers -- just ask any Minecraft player. I've been blogging about YUI for years, and thinking about how to "teach" about it. I think this has allowed me to build a few layers myself and brought me to building this site.

So - I'll begin writing articles here that focus on various parts of YUI, and the goal is that in about 6 months I'll compile them all up into an ebook that you can buy and read on your device of choice. (The website will always be here of course).

So, let's get started!