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>>I'm Nick Pettit. >>I'm Jason Seifer.

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>>And you're watching the Treehouse Show, your weekly dose of Internet,

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where we talk about all things web design, web development, and more.

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>>In this episode, we'll be talking about explaining CSS,

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JavaScript charts, and landing pages.

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>>Last week, I was out due to a bizarre faux hawk incident.

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I don't really want to go into the details.

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It was pretty gnarly.

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It's a little emotional, and fortunately, my faux hawk has grown back.

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>>I'm just glad everything's okay.

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[The Treehouse Show]

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First up is CSS Explain,

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which is this nifty little web site

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where you can go ahead and type in a CSS selector.

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So I'm going to use the example that they have here

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of Li.active strong

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and just below, it will tell me what kind of CSS selector it is,

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so in this case, it's tag selector,

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and I have to say this really slowly.

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It also tells you the CSS selector specificity. 

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>>There's a tough one to get right.

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>>It is, but it's a pretty nifty tool.

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A lot of times, when you're creating a lot of CSS,

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it can be a little difficult 

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knowing how strong a selector is,

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what type of selector you're actually using, 

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and what it's going to select on the page,

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and I like this tool,

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because sometimes, if you're not specific enough,

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it will tell you that the selector is actually universal,

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so this is pretty good

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if you're trying to debug CSS

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and you just want to make sure that

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you're typing in the right thing.

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It's a good sanity check.

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>>Yeah, this actually works off of the W3C CSS specificity specification.

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>>Sounds pretty official. >>Yeah, I just wanted to say all that,

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because that was probably the most difficult thing I've done all day.

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(laughter)

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Next up, we have something called xCharts.

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xCharts is a D3 based library

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for making charts in JavaScript.

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It uses the D3 JS library

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for manipulating HTML, CSS, and SVG

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so these charts are going to be scalable. 

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Now the charts are actually really, really pretty

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and easy to use on the web site.

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On the demo, they have just a regular bar chart

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as soon as you go in.

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You can also make line charts,

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and there's a ton of different examples;

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bar charts, multi-series bar charts, line charts.

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And in addition to just being able to make charts and make them look well,

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they have a ton of different methods and events

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 that you can use when creating these charts in JavaScript.

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So really, really nice plugin.

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Very, very easy to use,

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and we will have a link to this in the show notes

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at YouTube.com/gotreehouse.

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>>Pretty nifty.

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Next up is Lorem Pixel.

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So you've heard of Lorem Ipsum Text, right? That's the text that you use

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that doesn't really mean anything; it kind of looks like Latin,

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but it's not. It's just gibberish. 

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>>I just use that for placeholders, mainly, when creating--

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>>Exactly, so when you're designing in the browser,

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sometimes we'll use Lorem Ipsum Text

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to go ahead and hold the place of where real text would normally be.

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Well, Lorem Pixel does the same thing but for images.

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So let's say that

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you had an image that was

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going to be 935 pixels by 393.

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That's very specific,

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and I want this to be a picture of, say, nature.

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I can go ahead and click that I want this to be a color image.

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And it will go ahead and generate that for me.

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And then it will load up this nice picture of nature

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at exactly the size that I specified.

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Pretty amazing.

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>>That is beautiful picture of nature. >> It is a really nice picture of nature.

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But it's pretty useful.

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Designing in the browser is obviously a very popular technique, 

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so this is pretty cool that you can just go ahead and drop and placeholder images.

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It's always best, actually, to try and use real content

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whenever possible, especially with text,

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because you never know 

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how long or short text is actually going to be,

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so if you have real content, you should use that,

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but that's not always possible

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and in those cases, a tool like this is really useful.

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>>That's great.

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You know, we've talked about placeholder images before,

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but they basically just specified the size

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or it was like a gradient picture,

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but having something that is an actually picture

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that goes along with your content is very beneficial.

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>>Yeah. It makes it a little more realistic.

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>>Next up, we've got the Node Beginner Book.

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This is a free and paid book

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that you can get on the Internet,

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which tells you all about node.js.

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So right now, if you want to just go online and read it for free, you can.

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You can also buy a bundle to get a PDF and ePub version

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with free updates.

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This is a great book that goes through everything

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that you need to get up and running with node.js.

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Shows you how to build a Hello World application,

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even go through building HTTP servers

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and has a great introduction to JavaScript, as well.

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I'm not going to get into everything that this book goes over

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because it's really long, as you can tell

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from all this scrolling.

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>>I was hoping you were going to read the entire book to me right now.

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>> (laughter) That's going to be the extended episode of the Treehouse Show.

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I'll read all of this. >>I'll look forward to it.

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>>But no, it's a great book,

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so go ahead and check that out.

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>>Pretty nifty.

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Next up is a really cool blog post

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and it's a 50-point checklist for creating the ultimate landing page,

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and we're going to look at all 50 points, one at a time, right now.

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First up is using the checklist,

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so we're already off to a great start; we're using this checklist right now.

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We'll just go over a couple of these points here

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and basically, they ask just really good questions about landing pages.

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Landing pages, of course, being for marketing purposes.

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You know, it's something that you would link on, say, Twitter or social media channels

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and it would send your users to a specific page

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that has, say, a call to action

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where you would go ahead and sign up or learn more about the product.

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So some of these questions are things like

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does your landing page headline match the message on your ads?

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So, for example, if you had some ads that had particular marketing messaging,

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you'd want to make sure 

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that when a user clicks on that,

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they're taken to a landing page where the messaging matches that

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and you have consistent brand messaging

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so that they know that, okay,

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that ad I just clicked on is linked to this thing that I'm looking at now.

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Is your landing page messaging focused on a single purpose?

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So is it focused?

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Another one here is do you have a simple secondary description to enhance the headline?

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So all sorts of really cool quick sanity checks.

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Does this make sense?

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And it helps you to look at your land pages from a couple of different perspectives.

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>>It's probably going to be really good 

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if you're not too experienced creating landing pages

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or maybe it's one of your first few tries.

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>>Yeah, exactly. If you don't have a really good gut feel for whether or not

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a landing page is good, this will help you run down a couple of things

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that might you might not have considered.

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>>That's awesome. Next up, we have a project called AlertifyJS.

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This is billed as an unobtrusive and customizable JavaScript notification system.

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Now it offers a few different pieces of functionality 

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with dialogues, kind of modal dialogues 

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letting you dismiss messages

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or enter some information,

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click cancel or OK,

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and then if you look on the bottom right of the screen,

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you can see that it'll actually tell me

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when I click cancel.

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This is also going to be really useful

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when you want to have custom log messages.

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You can see as I'm clicking the different kinds,

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they just roll in on the bottom.

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And this is going to be something that's really useful

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when you are debugging your applications,

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say, in development.

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You could, of course, use the console.log functionality 

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that's built into most of the different browsers these days,

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or you could use this library maybe to--

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you know, if you only need to display a little bit of information.

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But yeah, it's a great project.

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It would also be really useful maybe for giving your users messages

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as they're using your application.

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But yeah, great project

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and you know, once again, we'll have a link to that in the show notes for AlertifyJS.

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>>Sweet.

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Next up is Bootsnipp.

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This is the last thing we're covering today.

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If I just go ahead and click on Snipps here,

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you get this really nice gallery of design patterns

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that you can use in a Bootstrap project.

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So say, for example, that you wanted to go ahead and create a search bar,

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click on View for that,

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and right here, they have all of the code that you need 

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to go ahead and put together in style that search bar.

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There's a couple of other common ones here,

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such as sign-up form, a 1-month calendar, 

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and right here,

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they have one for vacation rentals,

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which Jason, that would be really good

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 for the timesharing website that you wanted to tell me all about.

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>>Yeah, you definitely want to get in on the ground floor of that one.

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>>Yeah. Okay, cool.

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Well, I'm looking forward to that.

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>>I'll have to check out Bootsnipp, so this is just for Twitter Bootstrap,

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or does it work with Zero Foundation,

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I would suppose if it's called Bootsnipp, it's Bootstrap-based?

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>>It's probably--yeah, specific to Bootstrap.

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>>All right, sounds good.

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(laughter) So that's all we got for this episode.

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>>Yup, that's it. Who are you on Twitter? 

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>>I'm @NickRP.

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>>And I am @JSeifer. 

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Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Treehouse Show.

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If you want more information on anything we talked about,

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check out our show notes

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at Youtube.com/gotreehouse.

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>>And of course, if you'd like to see more videos like this one,

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you can check us out at

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TeamTreehouse.com.

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Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you nextw eek.

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[The Treehouse Show]

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[Treehouse™]

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If you'd like to see more advanced videos and tutorials like this one,

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go to TeamTreehouse.com

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and start learning for free.

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[?Electronic music?]