This is a guest post from high school student Ethan Eirinberg about his experience learning to code, and how he’s now encouraging other students to do the same with his recently launched creative coding competition, CreateHS.

When my brother was a freshman in high school, he wanted to create an iPhone app. Much to his surprise, building a simple iPhone app was a complex task. To get him started, he bought lots and lots of boring books. After 2 years and 19,000 lines of code, he finally released his app to the Apple app store.

His app inspired me to learn how to code. But two years, five huge books, and 19,000 lines of code didn’t sound appealing. So I went online to learn, but I didn’t know where to start. This process was extremely frustrating to me.

I waited until high school. Much to my surprise, when I entered high school, there was no programming class that I could take. In fact, there wasn’t even a club I could join to learn coding. In the meantime, while looking for solutions, I saw an article that said that Treehouse was giving away accounts to their website. Unfortunately, it was only available to college students. I passed it on to my brother.

About a month later, he called me to let me know that he had won! He was ecstatic. As was I. As soon as he returned home from college, I begged him to let me try it. I must have spent hours that night watching video after video. I’d learned more in a couple hours than I had with all the other websites I had tried.

I had finally found a solution to my problem. I began to think… “if I had this problem, I bet other kids in my school did too”. I set off to create a club. But who could teach it? I surely wasn’t good enough yet. So I called Treehouse to ask if we could use their website to teach us. I was ecstatic to hear that they were as interested in teaching high school kids as I was. I went to the student activities coordinator at the high school to get the club started, but I needed a teacher sponsor. After months of searching and planning, we finally started the club. We were so lucky that the only computer science teacher (AP Computer Science is only available to upperclassmen) agreed to sponsor it.

Last year there was a total of 40 members, but I hope for it to continue to grow this year. This past summer, I spent time thinking of new ways to motivate the club members. I thought it might be a good idea to get the members involved with competitions, but as I looked for competitions in which they might want to participate, there were none that encouraged creating. They were all based on solving problems.

So I decided to create my own. CreateHS is a website that encourages high school students to submit entries to the monthly challenges provided. The beginning challenges are to create websites with specific functionalities. The entries are judged on creativity, challenge requirements, and design. With the continual support from Treehouse and other companies, I hope to grow CreateHS to a global scale.

To learn more about CreateHS, check out its featured article on ReadWrite.

The post Student Success Stories: Ethan Eirinberg appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The following is a guest post by Shane Osbourne (@shaneOsbourne) from England. Besides being a musician, Shane is also an open source developer. Shane has developed a tool called Browser-sync for making CSS injection work across a wider swath of browsers than you might assume possible. And it does more than that, I'll let Shane tell you about it.

The ability to inject newly-modified CSS on every file change (without reloading the page) is the type of workflow-enhancement that you never truly appreciate... until you lose it.

This is exactly what happened to me recently.

For at least the last 12 months I had been using Grunt and the LiveReload browser extension to inject CSS when my files changed. It felt like a really nice workflow until I had to work on a project that required IE7 & 8 support. The LiveReload plugin I was using simply didn't support older versions of IE. For the first time in over a year I had to resort to manual page-refreshes every time I made a change to my CSS. It was painful. It's also why I built Browser-Sync

Introducing Browser-Sync

Browser-sync is a tool that gives you cross-browser CSS injecting. It will watch over your files and the moment you make a change, it will inform all connected browsers to reload (inject) the new CSS. This all happens without reloading the page. Most importantly, it works in every browser I've been able to test it on.

How Browser-Sync came to be

I knew from the outset that simply inserting new CSS into browsers is easy enough to do. The issue I had to solve was how to communicate a file-system change back to the browsers. The Grunt + LiveReload combination I was using previously relied on Web Sockets. This is why there was no support for old IE.

Say hello to Socket.io

I had my lightbulb moment when using Karma for running unit-tests. Karma allows you to run tests in multiple browsers. While testing in IE8 one day, I realized that Karma was automatically re-running the tests on each file save.

Bingo. I had found something that was able to watch the file system for changes and inform browsers all about it. I started to dig into the Karma source code. Eventually I discovered they were using Socket.io to achieve this.

Starting to come together

Everything was in place. With the pain endured from manual page refreshing as my driving force and the discovery of Socket.io as my inspiration, I was well set-up to build a tool that I would use myself on a daily basis.

Getting set up

This guide assumes you already have Grunt installed inside a project and know how to use it. If you don't, then you can learn about it on the Grunt site.

Browser-sync can be installed as a stand-alone command-line tool, or as a Grunt plugin. Because of the current popularity of Grunt I'll focus here on how to set it up as as Grunt Task. If you would prefer the command-line only approach, please checkout these instructions.

From the same file directory as your Gruntfile.js:

npm install grunt-browser-sync

This will install Browser-sync locally into your project. Now you can make sure it's loaded by Grunt by placing this near the end of your Gruntfile.js:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-browser-sync');

Finally, like all Grunt plugins, you'll need to provide some configuration. At a minimum, you'll need the following:

// Inside the Gruntfile.js config object
    browser_sync: {
        files: {
            src : 'assets/css/style.css'
        }
    }

With your config set up, you can run the plugin with this command:

grunt browser_sync

Now you should receive an HTML snippet that you can paste into the footer of your website. Place that there. Now whenever you change that CSS file (or it's changed by another build process), it will be automatically injected into all browsers.

Note: there are ways to specify multiple files and you can use wildcards (*) too. Please see the Readme on Github for more information.

A more automated approach

The example above is great for those situations where you already have a server. Building a site with WordPress or Rails, for example. But the downside is that you have that manual step of copying & pasting a snippet into a file. If you're working with static files (HTML, CSS, & JS) then you can use the built-in server instead. The built-in server will automatically insert any HTML snippets needed so you don't have to.

To use the built-in server, just set your config like this.

// Inside the Gruntfile.js config object
    browser_sync: {
        files: {
            src : 'app/css/style.css'
        }, 
        options: {
          server: {
            baseDir: "app"
        }
      }
    }

Files will now be served from the app directory and all the magic needed to inject CSS will be done for you.

Going even further

If you use the server option above, did you notice the IP address and port that is used? Normally something like 192.168.0.8:3001? Browser-sync tries to figure out a good external IP address to use for the server. That means you should be able to connect to it from any device/computer on the same WiFi network. The cool thing here is that the CSS injecting will work across all mobile devices and tablets too. When you see this type of automation in action, you're going to find it hard to live without it.

If it doesn't work for you

In my tests, I've found that on typical WiFi networks, Browser-sync does a fantastic job of getting the correct IP address. However, in a large office setup, you may find that it chooses an IP that is not accessible to other devices/computers. If this is the case, and you know what the correct one is, just provide it as an option like this:

// Inside the Gruntfile.js config object
    browser_sync: {
        files: {
            src : 'app/css/style.css'
        }, 
        options: {
          server: {
            host: "192.168.1.1",
            baseDir: "app"
        }
      }
    }

Beyond CSS injecting

Being a guest post on CSS-Tricks, I've focused mostly on setting up the CSS-injecting part of my tool. But Browser-sync does a lot more than that! It has something awesome called Ghost-mode.

Ghost mode will keep track of all connected browsers and keep the following in sync:

1. Scroll Position - extremely helpful when developing with multi-monitor
2. Form Fields - fill out a form in one browser and all others will be populated with that data.
3. Links - Reviewing a few pages of a newly built site? Have it open on all your devices and when you navigate from page to page, all the browsers with follow you around!

Conclusion

I hope this all sounds pretty cool to you. I loved building Browser-sync. I welcome feedback and issue reporting so that we can improve it as a community.

Remember Browser-sync can be used two ways:

• Stand Alone - installed globally, use anywhere
• Grunt Plugin - installed locally, configure as grunt task

Cross Browser CSS Injection is a post from CSS-Tricks

AMST 422: Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimoretrains students to complete research in cultural history and develop related public programming working with a community in Baltimore city. For spring 2014, we are working with the historic industrial community of Baybrook, which includes Brooklyn and Curtis Bay and the “lost neighborhoods” of Masonville, Fairfield, Wagner’s Point, and Hawkin’s Point. AMST 422 students have been working with residents of the community since 2009. The course incorporates the skills of social entrepreneurship—using entrepreneurial methods to produce measurable social outcomes. The culmination of the course is a public event in the community. Students complete numerous hours of community service, including attending community meetings, park cleanups, citizens on patrol walks, college fairs, and community gardening events to build relationships with residents. AMST 422 students will work with Professor Steve Bradley and his ART 390: Imaging Research Center (IRC) Fellows students on the final community event and populating the Mapping Baybrook digital exhibition with content: http://mappingbaybrook.org/  

During the semester, Students will research the environmental history of both industry and the green space in the community. We will also work with “green businesses” emerging in the area and with Jason Reed, who runs the Filbert Street Community Garden in Curtis Bay. Reed received an Open Society Institute (OSI) Fellowship in 2011 to continue his work with the garden and connected projects—which he calls the Curtis Bay-Brooklyn Urban-Agriculture and Stewardship Program (CUSP). The project uses urban agriculture to improve the health of residents, foster community pride, and increase awareness of the need for land stewardship and good nutrition: http://www.filbertstreetgarden.blogspot.com/ 

Central questions the spring 2014 classes will explore are: What is environmental justice? What are the parallels between the disciplines of art and history? Can students develop hybrid methods of inquiry? What does true interdisciplinary collaboration look like? How does collaboration complicate and enhance the learning experience? How can art and history be used to enhance justice in urban communities?

Course funded by seed money from a Kauffman Faculty Innovation grant and a Breaking Ground grant.

On Monday, November 4^th, UMB is hosting Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Craig Mello for a lecture followed by a Q&A session.  Dr. Mello is the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine and Co-Director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator since 2000.  His pioneering research on RNA interference, in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Fire, has been recognized with numerous awards culminating with the prestigious 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When:                  November 4^th, 2013 @ 9:30 am – 11:00 am

Where:                 Medical School Teaching Facility Auditorium

                              685 West Baltimore Street

                              Baltimore, MD 21201

 

The lecture is being sponsored by The Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative, AstraZeneca/MedImmune, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore.  This interactive session will be filmed by The Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative as part of its global program to help Nobel Laureates share their inspirational stories and insights. 

Check out fellow MCSer Marissa Piegols'  blog post about her summer internship experience with the Office of External Relations within the Office of the Inspector General at Social Security Administration. Here's a quote from the post:

"On the surface, an unpaid internship at the Social Security Administration might sound boring to someone with aspirations of working at a company like Google or Apple. You might be surprised at how much SSA can offer you in terms of valuable experience and learning opportunities! Regardless of the office you work for, I strongly believe that with an open mind and a good attitude, any internship with SSA will be an experience you will never regret."

Marissa has informed me that they are currently "looking for applicants with strong writing and/or graphic design or video editing skills." She has also kindly offered to pass along your resume to her contact there. Please email her at marissa5@umbc.edu if you are interested.

The goal of responsive web design is to seamlessly adapt the look and UX of a website to different platforms. The technique is still very young and in many areas outstrips the available technology.

Trilibis has announced the launch of SNOW — Software eNabling One Web — that aims to improve our ability to deliver responsive design by making websites truly device-aware, and by addressing the problems that have slowed its adoption:

• Responsive sites are slow
  A recent Akamai study of 347 responsive websites, found that 86% had the same data load regardless of their destination screen. This means that both a desktop computer and a bandwidth-limited iPhone are processing the same amount of data.
• Converting to Responsive Design usually means a complete website rebuild
  Often, both layout and architecture must be completely rethought to support fluid content.
• “Responsiveness” refers only to screen width, and no other parameters
  You can’t use RWD to target content by device or browser type, or otherwise optimize the experience for specific mobile use-cases.
• Inconsistent browser support
  Not all devices and browsers support Responsive Design the same way. More than ever, users pop from platform to platform while exploring a purchase decision: keeping responsive sites consistent remains a chore.

SNOW is HTML5-compliant server-side software that allows web designers and developers to create truly responsive multi-device websites. Based on a single code-base, using one URL, sites built with SNOW load fast across the full array of devices and seamlessly adjust their layout and user experience to different platforms.

Two of the main claims of SNOW for web designers is that it maintains and draws from a constantly updated device library and can augment existing web assets and code, rather than requiring a total rebuild.

SNOW is available as a free developer version or enterprise license. To find out more about how it works, visit the Trilibis website, or download their white paper.

Have you developed with SNOW? How do you solve these responsive design dilemmas? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, snow image via Shutterstock.

100 Professional Hotel Icons + 58 Scribble Social Icons – only $5!

by Jacki Stone