GitHub has a nifty feature called GitHub Pages that allows you to serve files in your repository to the web. Those files have to reside in the branch gh-pages, which is different from the usual master branch. To avoid the slightly cumbersome maintenance of two branches, this post shows you how to only work with gh-pages.

Update 2012-03-19: New section on “Objects”, tips for what to read next.

This blog post illustrates several JavaScript inheritance topics via an example: We start with naive implementations of a constructor Point and its sub-constructor ColorPoint and then improve them, step by step.

Today, Douglas Crockford introduced a new project: JSDev. It solves a challenge with privacy: On one hand, you don’t want the outside world to have access to private functionality. On the other hand, you want to test it, via external unit tests.

JavaScript is Spartan when it comes to built-in data structures. One commonly uses objects as maps from strings to values. This post points out three pitfalls when doing so.

Both objects and arrays play multiple roles in JavaScript. This blog post explains what those roles are.

Allen Wirfs-Brock (the project editor of the ECMAScript 5 specification) recently mentioned the thought process behind method names such as Object.getOwnPropertyNames():

Update 2012-03-13: Added a section on installation.

Paul Miller’s es6-shim gives you functionality that will be in ECMAScript 6 (code-named ECMAScript.next), on ECMAScript 5 engines. It was initially based on a project of mine, but adds much new functionality, Node.js compatibility, and (not least) tests.

JavaScript’s built-in constructors are difficult to subclass. This post explains why and presents solutions.

In the JavaScript world, one frequently encounters the words shim and polyfill. What are those things and what is the difference between them?

Duolingo achieves an impressive win-win: Customers get to learn a foreign language for free while helping the company translate texts.