These days, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc.) seem much more popular than feeds (RSS, Atom). Google claims about the latter that their “usage has declined”. That begs the question: have social media made feeds irrelevant? This blog post answers that question with a firm “no” and explains why.

[2015-02-26] New version of this blog post: “Iterables and iterators in ECMAScript 6”

The iterator pattern enables unified and simple access to the elements stored in data structures. Generators are lightweight coroutines. Think: functions that can be suspended and resumed. Among other things, they help with implementing iterators.

This blog post explains how iterators and generators work in ECMAScript 6. The iterator protocol has recently changed, this post explains the new protocol.

This blog post explains how to search several websites (not just a single search engine!) from the omnibox (address bar) in Google Chrome.

Update: This blog post has become a chapter in my book “Speaking JavaScript”. You can read it here: “Basic JavaScript”.

This blog post enables you to get started with JavaScript as quickly as possible – if you already know how to program. It describes the smallest subset of the language that allows you to be productive. I call that subset “Basic JavaScript” and recommend to program in it for a while, before moving on to more details and advanced topics. Learning everything at once is too confusing. The post concludes with tips for what to learn next.

On 2013-05-30, I held the talk “An overview of ECMAScript 6” at Fluent Conference, in San Francisco. The video is now publicly available (go there for a larger version of the video). And yes, I was slightly jet-lagged.

JavaScript’s with statement has been deprecated for a while [1]: it slows down your code and is forbidden in strict mode. Additionally, it makes it harder to evolve the language, because code that uses it is more brittle.

This blog post demonstrates how to use ECMAScript 6 proxies to automatically bind methods that are extracted from an object.

Let’s say you want to write a constructor that produces instances that are frozen (immutable). One problem, you have to solve, is: when do you freeze this? If you always – unconditionally – perform the operation in the constructor then you can’t create sub-constructors that have their own instance properties. This blog post explains how to work around this problem.

So you want to trigger an event for a DOM element, without using jQuery? This blog post gives you a quick recipe for doing so.

The running example is about sending a submit event to a form. I needed to do that for a demo of user interface testing via CasperJS. And, unfortunately, the Form#submit method does not send that event on most web engines.

The main point of the blog post “Thoughts on asm.js vs PNaCl” (by Gregg Tavares) is:

It just seems like asm.js and PNaCl are closer than people are admitting.

Some of the other points he is making are more controversial, so be sure to read the comments to get the complete picture.