nuemedia

I remember when I started learning how to program I would scour the interwebs looking for new effects or techniques I had never seen before. When I found a site that had one of the these I would meticulously dissect all the code to understand how it worked and try to replicate it. I remember one of the first sites that blew me away was the original DHTML interface at 13thparallel (we’re talking years and years ago). Up until then I had no idea of the power and things you could with JavaScript.

I spent a long time learning JavaScript (as well as XHTML and CSS) but it soon became apparent that it had its limitations – the big one being data storage. Since JavaScript is client side you can’t store any information about the user. That is when I discovered PHP and MySQL and the same process of finding new things that could be done with them and learning how to do it was repeated.

My point with all of this is that the biggest learning tool for me was looking at existing websites and studying the code. It was a lot easier back then because there were no packers, or other compression tools so it was really easy to just look, read and replicate. The code for this site is packed and compressed to squeeze every last byte out but it doesn’t make it very user friendly.

Therefore in order to help those of you who are currently learning, or those simply interested in how things work around here, I am giving and open invitation to ask me how. If you want to know how the scrolling headers work, video section or even some of the server side code then leave a comment below. The areas with the most interest I’ll write posts with the scripts and a description of what’s going on.