Winter break is coming up fast, meaning I have a few weeks of rare free time. I want to use the time to learn as much as possible about topics I don't consider myself strong in. I've put together a list of things I've been wanting to learn, but it's incomplete. I welcome suggestions and additions, and I'll add them to the list - I'd love to foster a discussion on some interesting topics!

Scala

This is the big one for me - Scala is a statically typed language that brings functional programming concepts to the JVM. It's very fast (sorry Ruby), and gaining popularity, notably at Twitter. I have a feeling it will become one of the next big things.

• Why does Twitter use Scala?
• Learning Scala
• Scala for the Impatient

I was surprised today to find out that cURL does not have SFTP support built in. I ran into the issue trying to get set up with René Moser’s awesome git-ftp script, which is exactly what I needed to manage deployments for one of my sites running in a restricted server environment. I’ll write more about git-ftp later, but in short, it gives you all the deployment goodness and capabilities of git when you only have FTP access to a server. In particular, I need to use it with SFTP, but kept running into the error Protocol sftp not supported or disabled in libcurl .

As it turns out, there’s no easy way to add SFTP support to cURL. In the end, I had to rebuild the library from source with some special tweaks. I got frustrated from poring over archaic mailing list posts and jumbled documentation, so I wanted to share the steps I took to get it to work.

Update: I’ve since overhauled this project to be an npm package called Arabica. You should check it out.

I recently started a new project in CoffeeScript, and began by looking for a good build system. When developing a JavaScript-heavy application, concatenating and minifying scripts is crucial in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests and download size, making your app nice and snappy. Unfortunately order can matter when concatenating files, so randomly lumping together everything in the source directory isn't enough. I set out to find a solution that allowed me to specify files in the order to compile, with the ability to watch a directory for convenience. This is what I threw together - a Ruby Rakefile that makes use of the uglifier and listen gems, inspired by a script by Clay.io.

If you're familiar with any blogging platform or content management system, you've likely heard the term 'URL alias'. But what exactly does this refer to, and what problem does it solve? Let's start by looking at some common examples. If you've ever used Drupal, something like the path node/369 might look familiar to you. Then consider some example post on this site, accessible through the path andrewberls.com/blog/post/1234. What's happening in both of these schemes is that we're accessing a piece of content based on its ID in a database. However, these URLs are not particularly revealing - the difference between node/369 and node/254 is a mystery as far as we're concerned. Instead, we'd like to define URLs with a human-readable structure that describes a page's content. This is what a URL alias is - a readable path that allows us to access a resource. We'd like to create aliases for our content so that instead of using database IDs, we can using something more descriptive, perhaps using the content title to get something of the form andrewberls.com/blog/post/my-awesome-post. Implementing an aliasing scheme is beyond the scope of this article - instead, this is a small feature I wrote for my blog which automatically suggests paths based on a post's title.

Mobile development doesn't have to be hard. That's why I created my latest project - Cheeky.css, a grid system that makes building responsive sites a breeze. It's more important than ever to create mobile-friendly sites, but defining a separate version or stylesheet just for handhelds is a pain. With Cheeky, you only have to style your page once, and your content will automatically scale to fit the browser width.

Using Cheeky

If you've used any grid before, the syntax will be very familiar. Cheeky is based off an 1100px grid with 16 columns contained in rows. 16 is an arbitrary number, but combined with familiar column offsets, you have the freedom to structure your content exactly how you like. To get started, everything is unsurprisingly contained in a <div class="container">. From there, you lay out your columns inside a <div class="row">, 16 to a row. Columns are defined using the syntax <div class="span-#">, where # is any number between 1 and 16. Offsets are almost identical - just toss on a class="offset-#", except that you can only offset up to 15. Let's take a look at the bare minimum example: