Linkdump for October 2nd
¶ by Rob Friesel-
John Maguire, writing for The Atlantic:
How should one train students to give good, vivid examples in their writing? Should you tell them, Be more specific? I used to do that but I don't any more, because it's too vague, not operational. Today I give students a shortcut. I say, "Write physically. Write with physical objects. Put physical objects in your essay."
He's writing more about expository essays (the kind you write for college classes) but I think the advice works equally well for fiction.
And it's timely. I had a conversation with one of my beta readers today, and he told me that he wound up feeling a strong connection to a character that I kill off in the very first chapter. When I asked him why, he thought about it for a second and said (paraphrased): "It was the fingerless gloves. Just the one little detail gave him this whole life that you didn't even need to include."
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"The greatest tool for sorting CSS properties in specific order."
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Slava Oliyanchuk, writing at Smashing Magazine. CSScomb isn't a linter, but it promises to enforce a sane/sensible and "functional" ordering of your properties within your CSS files. Which sounds great–now it just needs to support Sass/SCSS (where I write all of my "CSS" anyway) and I'll be all set. (Consider me chomping at the bit for that.)
UPDATE: I installed the SublimeText plugin and tried it out on some SCSS files with… mixed results. If I selected a small and specific block, the re-ordering worked pretty well. (It put the mixin at the top, but I fixed that…) However, trying to “comb” the whole file made things an irrecoverable mess. YMMV.
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Isaac makes it sound like TypeScript is to JavaScript, as Groovy is to Java? (Only in reverse? Or maybe calling it JavaScript's Scala is a better analogy?)
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@kjbekkelund:
In this blog post I will gradually refactor a bit of code from how I used to write JavaScript before, into proper Backbone.js code using models, collections, views and events. Hopefully this process will give you a firm understanding of the core abstractions in Backbone.js.
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