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.