Commenting in JavaScript

You're probably wondering why I chose this topic to write about, but it's funny how people get commenting so wrong while programming. Instead of explaining what or why their code does something, they give you a statement and expect you to figure out their code all on your own. That's wrong, isn't it? I mean, of course you're expected to analyze their code and find out what it does exactly, but when it comes to participating in huge projects, giving you an idea is a necessity - that's called working together.

Good Commenting

After a few times of doing it, you probably assumed that you got commenting down like a boss. And to be honest, I really don't blame you. All it requires is just a short summary of what that line of code (or block of code) does in your program. But it's how you explain it. Some people believe that they need to explain to the extreme just for you to understand what they had written, but that's not really the case. All you need is a nice, short sentence. Especially if someone knows how to program JavaScript. If someone didn't know however, that would be a different story (nosy buzzers).

Take a look at the picture above. The comment is short, clean and responsible for it's purpose. I didn't have to make multiple comments just to explain what my function does, because it honestly doesn't require that much explaining. Just summarizing it turned out to be efficient enough. Tips I advise are:

1. Explain as if you're telling someone your dream, only shorter.
2. Keep it short so that it won't flood the file with your multiple lines of comments.
3. Don't let your comment stretch out in the file so that people have to use the scroll bar to read it. 
4. Beautify your comments if necessary.
5. Always put your comments ABOVE your code. Never underneath it.

This isn't really something I expect for you to stress out over. In fact, it's not even necessary to. Commenting should be fun and powerful at the same time - you just have to do it right. But if you're doing it wrong and nobody understands a single line of your code (especially if it's complex), then you might want to erase what you created or either find another way to explain it correctly. 

Forever Alone with Code

As a short conclusion, don't write a block of code if you can't explain it. Not worth it.

Bad Commenting

Really?!

Sometimes programmers explain what their code does to the point that they're literally teaching you how to program for the first time. That's too far. That's like teaching a forty year old woman how to say a simple English greeting that she probably already knew..
Now, I'm not saying that all of us are smart when it comes to programming, but none of us are stupid either. Especially if we know how to program. hint, hint hint.

Bad comments are usually easy to distinguish from good ones; they don't provide much detail, they're way too long and possibly make absolutely no sense at all. As I mentioned above, summarizing is the key that leads to success. Not all of us are good at writing, but explaining what you did really shouldn't be that hard, unless it's an engine we're talking about - but not even that, because people also make documentations for their engines so that they're understandable, so that's not even a good excuse. Sorry!

Only the fittest will survive.

To avoid such annoyance and to perfect the obvious, practice. And when I mean practice, I mean practice. Every time you write a line of code that seems as if it's going to be complicated for others to understand, attempt to make a comment about it. This helps to see if you actually understood what wrote, so take your time and try giving it a shot.


Hope you guys enjoyed this post! Sorry for not posting earlier - I got caught up with a few things, so it's been a while. But please keep a look out for more posts by me! I'll be updating again shortly. :) 

Creating Your Own Rickroll

Troll: "Go ahead, go ahead! Click the link!"

*click*

*rick-rolled completely*

You know how all of those trolls and newbies used to get you with that repetitive, annoying yet catchy, rick-rolling gif with that song? I always wondered how they did it - didn't you? Especially since you'd have to use your task manager to click off the entire web browser because you couldn't just simply click it off. How annoying.  

But we're about to create one ourselves today! It's about time you got your revenge back and created your own personal one from scratch. Whaddaya think? Ready to rick-roll? Good. 

If you want to view mine in action, feel free to click on this link. But don't worry, I didn't add any alert boxes or such so that you won't be able to click it off like a troll.  It's just a simple rick-roll with a little sign (look above) saying you got "rick-rolled". Instead of spamming someone with complete alert boxes or whatever, we're going to keep it simple and produce something like that. Take notice that this program does not include the usage of jQuery. 

1.  Finding an Animated Rick-Roll gif

Ah, just looking at his face makes you get rick-rolled. It's like a curse, y'know? But anyway, if you don't want to use the one I have (although it's best that you do), then search for another. But in this tutorial, I'm going to use the exact same one. But just Google search "Rick-rolled gif animated" and you'll see a bunch - even the one where he has his cool shades on. Make sure you copy the image link though, please!

2.  Using JSBin to Code

In all of my tutorials, I always use JSBin. It's a free website where you can code HTML/CSS and JavaScript (as well as a few other languages, CoffeeScript and jQuery of course). Some people use JSFiddle as well, but I personally use JSBin due to my own liking of it. You can choose whichever one you want though. :)

3. Displaying the Animated gif with HTML

To begin, we want to provide an <img/> tag. <img/> tags are tags that reference to an image, so you wouldn't be able to use this tag for any other purposes. For more details, click here. Make sure you create a closing backslash since <img/> tags don't have their own personal closing tag. 

After doing that, we want to provide two attributes to our <img/> tag; one being an ID and the other being called source. The id attribute allows us to produce some CSS code to that specific tag only. If you still don't understand, it's like giving it special abilities unlike the rest. 

To make use of our image link that we copied (the rick-rolled animation, remember?), let's put it in the source attribute in quotation marks. Also, take notice from the image I displayed above (you can click on the image to enlarge it, by the way) - you need a equal sign (=) to attach the image to the source attribute. Same goes for the id attribute; you need to provide an equal sign and then quotation marks. Only difference is naming your id, which could be anything you want! I put mine as "rickrolled".

4. Using CSS to Stretch Our Image

  

 In the CSS file, I linked my id attribute that was connected to the <img/> tag. Remember, ids' are hash tags in CSS when you're trying to edit it. 

Take a look at the code - it's quite simple, right? Glad you agreed. To explain top from bottom:

1. I set it's position to fixed so that the user won't be able to scroll the image - it's basically locked onto the screen.
2. I set the width and height to 100 percentage to adjust it's size, since it was a small image when we had first saw it. Now it stretches out, although you probably won't see much of an change.  
3.  I set the top and left to 0 pixels so that it evens itself out. It helped determine the size to a perfect fit with no struggle whatsoever. Your image will probably look blurry, but that's because you got a bad gif/png (not my fault!).
4. Notice the brackets. Those are important. Don't forget to add yours!

Now, if you click that little black arrow in the upper right corner (if your "Output" tab is highlighted), then you should see the code in action. Your little rick-rolling buddy should be rick-rolling those fools to death. Well, you being the fool as of now. 

5. Getting Audio (what is rick-rolling without music?)

Okay, this is such a bad picture.. Looks like a website that would give you a virus, huh? But it's not. In fact, I use this website all of the time for my games. It's called Mp3Skull - check it out (you're going to need to anyways if you want to follow this tutorial..). In the search box, make sure you type up exactly what the song is called. Sometimes you'll get a result from some guy named Barry I believe, but he's not the rick-roller. Just some weirdo who tried mocking Rick Astley's song. Sorry!

After you do that, I want you to hold down the left-click button on your mouse where the download button where the mp3 file is (see it?) and drag it into your URL box at top. My demonstration was poorly illustrated, but I apologize for that. But when you're finished with following that step, make sure you copy the entire link - we're going to need it.  

6. Playing the Audio in Your HTML Document

  

You made it this far, great! You must be determined to troll people. Now, we're going to want to make use of our link that we got.. We need to create an audio player in JavaScript. This is sort of like manipulating the DOM (HTML document). Let me explain the code from top to bottom in my JavaScript file/tab above:

1. First, we created a variable called audio. After we did that, we assigned it as a new Audio Object with the new keyword. Then, we gave it parentheses with quotation marks inside of it with the link to our audio (that's where you post your audio link at!). If you understand Objects, you'd understand this very well.
2.   Below that piece of code, we used the Audio Object's method: .loop on our Object (the variable "audio"). We assigned it to the boolean value true so that it keeps the audio looping - yes, that's the purpose of this method. We don't want our audio to end, so we have to keep it rolling (get it?).
3. As you probably guessed, the code below that plays the audio that contains our rick-roll song. High five. But to notice that .play() is a method. We even have the ability to pause our music as well, but that's not needed to be mentioned.   

If you want to test it run, don't be shy! Give it a shot. It should work perfectly fine (if you did it correctly). If a problem occurs, just analyze my code above and see what you missed - I understand this might be a little difficult for you to understand, so don't force yourself to learn all of it in one day.

That's it! Your rick-rolling mayhem should be ready to start! You probably noticed the little advertisement banner at the bottom of your image (if you selected this one), but don't worry about it. You could always create a border that says "YOU GOT RICKROLLED" if you feel need to do so like I did. But I encourage you to add your own ideas and see what you come up with! Perhaps you can create that never-ending, painful spam of alert boxes that trollers use to create. Good luck! :)

Have fun! I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial! Stay tuned for some more and keep your eyes peeled for more interesting posts by me!

(How-to make) jQuery Alphabets for Kids

I'm going to show you how to create a simple program that contains the alphabets (A through Z) in HTML while making it interactive with the power of jQuery. The code is simple, repetitive and most importantly, fun for everyone to learn from.

I found this to be a good program to start with if you're a beginner who knows jQuery but doesn't know how to utilize it. The key of this post is to show you that jQuery is a powerful library (made out of JavaScript) and you can do just about anything with it. If you want to view the code in action, here is the link.

Some of the audio I implemented inside of that program are different from the rest - did you notice? I only did that because of my hilarious, sick humor, so my baby sister says (not really). But it's true, because I didn't want to do something if it didn't please me. What fun is that? None at all. So, do whatever you want to your program, but make sure it still has it's kid-friendly kick to it.

Step 1. Using JSBin

To begin, we're going to pull up JSBin. JSBin is a free website that allows you to program JavaScript, jQuery and HTML/CSS all together. If you look at the tabs above, you can see "HTML", "CSS", "JavaScript", "Console" and "Output". We honestly have no concern for the console tab, so close it if it appears to be highlighted on your page. The "Output", however, is going to be needed. If you click on it, you'll see a few options in the display menu saying "run JS" and a checkbox saying "Auto-run JS" - you can leave those settings alone. There should be an arrow though on the right-side of those two options, and it will open up your code in a HTML file. This is going to be useful because we're going to want to view our code for correct positioning (for the letters and such) and provide test-runs, so keep this in mind.

Step 2. Providing jQuery

We're using jQuery, so it's important that we provide the link for it. Luckily, JSBin has all this, so you can just click the "Add Library" button and select the "jQuery 2.1.0". It will automatically insert the jQuery link for you inside of your HTML file - what a breeze!

Step 3. Getting Started


First, let's provide an image for our little program. You want your background to be catchy and appealing to kids, not some boring plain white-background. Kids would be so displeased with you, trust me. So, find an image (Mine is already chosen)! Make sure you copy the url image link.

After you picked an image (and copied it's URL link! Important!) You're going to want to place it somewhere.. Luckily we have <img> tags! In our HTML file, we're going to want to create one and then close it with a self-closing backslash. After we do that, we're going to want to provide two attributes to the tag; the ID attribute (that allows us to do CSS code) and the source attribute. If the image I provided is too small to see, I'll demonstrate below:

<img id="background" src="whereourimagelinkgoes"/>


Remember, all of this goes in the HTML file. If you noticed in the picture above, I circled two code pieces. The one on the right is CSS and the one on the left (you guessed perfectly) is HTML. In the CSS file, I took the ID that is connected to the <img> tag and provided it with code. The code fills the entire HTML document with that background image you chose. Pretty cool, huh? I also included another property for that element (that's what all tags in HTML are called, by the way) which is called position. It allows you to lock an image to the page (using the "fixed" value) or move freely (using the "absolute" feature). I'm not the best teacher out there, so I'm only speaking from my own understanding. Your code should look like this in the CSS file:

#background {
   width:100%;
    height:100%;
  top:0px;
    left:0px;
  position:fixed;

}

You can view to see if your code is working properly by clicking on the black arrow like I had mentioned in the "Output" button. Your image should cover the entire HTML document.

Step 4. Creating the letters

Finally, the fun part! We're going to want to create our first letter on our HTML document - the letter "A". Starting with the HTML file first, we're going to want to make a <div>. In this div, we're going to need an attribute ID and call it "letterA".  This helps us distinguish our elements if we ever get caught up in something by accident, so it's important that you name your IDs' carefully. Make sure you put the actually letter "A" in the div so that it'll show in the HTML document.

In the CSS file, give your letter "A" a color using the "color" attribute. After you do that, give your text a font, a size and a position set to "fixed". We don't need to move this letter, so it can remain in it's place.

Step 5. Second letter and the use of jQuery


Repeat the same method as last time (in step 4) for the second letter. But we're going to need to use the "margin" property in the CSS file this time to move your second letter from the first.

I created another <div> with a similar ID name to identify the letter and then embedded some CSS code.
The difference in the CSS file is the "margin" property, which I set to a hundred pixels. This allows it to avoid conflict between the two objects by separating them instead of being on each other. The second letter will rest aside on the right-hand side next to the first letter.

Here comes the jQuery part! We want our letters to expand when we hover over them. But when we leave from that letter, we want it to go back to it's regular size. The code "mouseenter" stands for when the mouse hovers over an object, while "mouseleave" stands for when the mouse leaves an object - kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
 In the mouseenter function, I expanded the letter using the .css method. It's literally just another way to edit an element instead of doing it within the CSS file itself, making it easier for programmers to change how something looks and appears. Your outcome should look like this in your output, and moving your cursor across the letters should expand then go back to it's regular size when left:

Step 6. Getting Audio (soundfxcenter)

Now, finding audio for your games and stuff is really difficult. Really difficult. In fact, it took me nearly days to get good audio for those letters! But my determined self never gave up, so I landed upon Soundfxcenter.

It's a really good website that provides nearly every audio and sound effect for you. I definitely recommend that you get your audio from here. It lags kind of bit, but there aren't any pop-ups nor viruses on there. So don't be shy.

If you search up "Letter sounds", you should be able to find the exact same audio that I have. Try to find the "A" letter sound first, then "B", "C" and so on. But here comes the tricky part:

You don't want to download the actual file - you want to copy it's link location instead. So, to do this, left-click on the "Download MP3" link and drag it into your URL box at the top. The link should have ".mp3" at the end of it, indicating that it's an MP3 file. Copy the link and move onto the next step!


Step 7. Making Use of the Audio

Now that you got your audio link, let's put it to use.

This part of code involves the use of actual JavaScript this time, so if you know JavaScript and at least one DOM method, you're good to go.

1. We created an variable called "letterA" and then turned it into an "Audio Object" by using the new keyword. 
2. After we did that, we put out link inside of quotations, closing off the piece of code with a semicolon. 
3. Then, we called upon that Object, using the method .play() to activate the sound we provided.

Now you have your sound working! High five-- I mean, air five! Feel free to test it out in the "Output" section. But just to note, if the sound doesn't work right away, give it time. Loading your code is a lot of work for your HTML document.

Step 8. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat. You're On Your Own

Create another <div> tag with a letter inside of it, give it an ID, utilize some CSS code, margin it (to the correct spot aside the other letters) and then use the same jQuery code demonstrated in Step 5. Basically, repeat yourself.  Your code should look very similar to mine after a while, except the fact that I used the <span> tags for no reason in my code..

Once you're done with your program, please submit it for viewing in the comment section! I'd love to see your creativity, work and skills. Thanks for reading this and I hope you learned a great deal from it. :)

- Yazid