In the Wild for October 15, 2010

By Eric MiragliaOctober 15th, 2010

YUIConf 2010 is right around the corner, and we continue to have our heads down working on that event and the upcoming YUI 3.3.0 release. In the meantime, here’s what we’ve noted in the community in the past few weeks. Let us know @yuilibrary (or in the comments below) what we missed!

• Andrew Wooldridge, “Learning YUI: Pt. 2 – Community, Logging, and the Console”: Andrew Wooldridge (@triptych) is back with part 2 of his new “Learning YUI” blog series. I particularly like (and agree with) his take on the YUI community: “In a word, community is really what makes YUI stand out to me as a javascript library. If you need help working with YUI, there are community forums, an IRC channel, as well as Open Hours that allow you to talk directly with YUI developers. I would recommend that you get connected early on in your learning experience, especially with the IRC channel because you will discover a helpful group of smart folks hang out there and are willing to answer any question, no matter how seemingly mundane. You also should follow yuilibrary on twitter as you will be tapped into the latest YUI news there.” Check out the full blog post for more. I covered part one in a previous “In the Wild” column. #
  
• Andrew Burgess’s “Crash Course” on YUI 2 Grids on NetTuts: Andrew Burgess’s “Crash Course” on YUI 2 Grids, which we first noted in May last year, has been picked up by NetTuts and is bringing a new wave of attention to what has historically been one of YUI’s most popular projects. #
  
• Create a BlogRoll with Google Spreadsheets and YUI3: Andrew Wooldridge (@triptych) continues his series of YUI 3-focused articles with a new entry that ties together YUI 3 and Google Docs. “I admit it: I was inspired by this article by Codeinfront.com. The idea of creating a snippet of code that anyone can share, update, and learn from is just extremely compelling and gratifying. So, I offer to you something that you may have never thought of. You can use Google Spreadsheets as a JSON data source. YUI3′s JSONP module talks very nicely to this JSON data source and allows you to essentially create sites that can be data driven and yet never require you to have a complicated PHP MyAdmin setup or MYSQL database. You can do it all via client-side technologies and some help from Google Spreadsheets. If you combine this with the Forms ability in G Spreadsheets, you could even create a cool report page based on some survey you create. Let’s get down to code.” Get down to code with the full blog post here #
  
• Video Remixing Site Dragontape Using YUI 3: Video remixing site Dragontape is making extensive use of YUI 3. Here’s how the site’s authors describe the project: “Dragontape is a webapp that enables you to create mixtapes of your favorite online videos, so you can watch them as a continuous show. The tapes you create are accessed through a single URL, so you can easily share with friends or embed them in a webpage. The source clips remain in their original locations, Dragontape simply remembers where to find them.” #
  
• Erik Eldridge, “Simple YUI 3 Module for Yahoo! Login”: YDN evangelist Erik Eldrige has written up a nice tutorial on his personal blog that shows you how to leverage YUI 3 and Yahoo!’s OpenID system simply and efficiently. Writes Erik: “Looking at the OpenID landing page on the YDN site might give the impression that logging users into a site with a Yahoo! ID is difficult. Given the following conditions, however, adding Yahoo! login to your site can be quite simple:
  1. Because we’re only targeting Yahoo! accounts, we can preset the login location to https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth
  2. If we log users in via a popup, but manage everything via JavaScript on the parent page, we can skip validation of the response coming back from Yahoo!”

  You can find the full tutorial here. #
  

• Upstage, a New YUI 3-powered HTML5 Presentation System by Reid Burke: @Reid is just getting this project underway, but there’s a lot to like already. Following in the footsteps of a series of standards-based presentation tools that have launched in the last few years, Upstage puts a YUI 3 twist on the genre. Code is on GitHub — download, fork, and have fun. (Original source.) #
  
• A Simple Twitter Widget with YUI 3 and YQL (by @codeinfront): @codeinfront has posted a new tutorial on using YUI 3 and YQL in a Twitter mashup. “While in between projects I’ve been playing around with JavaScript dates including conversion to relative time. This then lead me to testing the function within a Twitter widget context. I ended up with a Twitter widget using YUI 3 and YQL. The code below explores a couple of interesting concepts…” Check out the blog post for full details. #
  
• “YUI, How Dare You Make Me Rethink…”: Michigan Techie writes that YUI 3 is designed to break bad habits and challenges him to find new, hopefully better coding patterns. “When you use YUI3 you have a YUI().use() and everything gets encapsulated within that bit of code. So if I were to just move the MyApp code into the YUI block I’m no longer able to access it from the page of content I want to run JS on. So this is good, no JS globals, but it’s bad…not the way I’ve been doing things.” You can see MT’s full epiphany here. #
  
• Jeez.eu on Building a Custom Search Engine with YUI: Jeez.eu’s tutorial on building a custom search engine relies heavily on YUI 2 widgets and utilities. #
  
• Node.js Resource List from @codeinfront Includes Crockford, Dav Glass: Blogger Mark Rall (@codeinfront) has compiled a set of his favorite Node.js-related resources. Key among them are two recent YUI Theater talks from Douglas Crockford and Dav Glass. For his other favorites, head over to his blog. #
• ErisDS Has Updated Her Carousel Custom-navigation Example for 2.8.x: Northampton blogger ErisDS has updated her work on custom navigation for YUI 2 Carousel to support YUI 2.8.x. “Last year I published two parts of a three part tutorial (doh) on the YUI2 Carousel Widget which worked with YUI Carousel 2.7.0. Since that time, a new couple of new versions of the YUI2: Carousel widget have been released (2.8.0 and 2.8.1), and it seems my examples do not work with the updated code. This post covers the issues, the reasons why they occur and how to resolve them.” Check out the full post here. #
  
• Tweet of the Week: From @bartt: “Being able to use #YUI on both client & server is so nice. JavaScript + my favorite library on both sides of the fence == !context switch.” #