Just Another Cluster #1

Welcome to the first ever issue of the Weekly Cluster.

I decided that it's time to put together a list of useful tools, interesting articles, that I find during a week. Weather it's a cool new CSS tool, a wonderfully written article by @SaraSoueidan or a masterfully crafted pen by @anatudor, I'm going to share it.

This is how we're going to do this: I'm going to gather the stuff I mentioned above, make a list, write a few words about each one of them and then share it with the world. You don't have to subscribe to any newsletter or any of that jazz.

If you, for example find any interesting tools or articles that I might have missed, let me know in the comments below and I'll share them in the next weekly cluster.

Without further adieu here are last week's interesting links!

1. CSS vs. SVG: Shapes and Arbitrarily-Shaped UI Components
   In this article Sara Soueidan explains a few techniques for creating arbitrarily-shaped UI components using CSS properties and SVG’s capabilities, and a mix of both!
2. Firefox Nightly starts marking login-forms in HTTP as insecure
   Mattias Geniar shares some insight into why you should switch to HTTPs if your site has any kind of login section because now Firefox is giving you even more of an incentive to do so.
3. Diving deep into SVG animations
   Daniel O'Connor is going undercover to unmask all the secrets of SVG animations.
4. Gulp for Beginners
   If you're a beginner with Gulp (you know, that tool all your developer friends now use to optimise their .js files) then you might want to checkout this great intro tutorial on CSS Tricks.
5. Virtual Machine to test MS Edge and IE6 through IE11
   I'm not sure why I'm sharing this one, since Edge is still a work in progress and everybody dislikes IE. But hey, maybe someone out there will find this useful in some way or another.
6. Is it maintained?
   ... that is the questions: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer - The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Check if open source projects are still maintained.
7. How to Keep Web Animations From Slowing You Down?
   Have you ever thought about how you can keep web animations from slowing your app down? Jordan Wade has and he come to some interesting conclusions that you might want to consider when building or rebuilding your app.
8. clipboard.js
   Is a modern approach to copy text to clipboard because it uses no Flash, no dependencies and it's just 2kb. Yes, just 2kb. You know what else is 2kb, your old dial-up connection.
9. Checklist for your new Open Source JavaScript Project
   So you're building an open source JS project. Have you thought about everything? What about creating a package.json file or what about adding a .gitignore? I thought so. This checklist might come in handy.
10. Ludicrously Fast Page Loads - A Guide for Full-Stack Devs
    Your website is slow, but the backend is fast. This guide will teach you how to diagnose performance issues on the frontend of your site.
11. Styling a Server-Generated File Directory
    One word, Apaxy. Also I have a project for this.
12. Chrome Devtools Tips & Tricks
    You think you know how to use Chrome DevTools? Think again. For eg. did you know that you can jump to a specific file, by name, using ctrl-p?
13. httpie: A CLI http client that will make you smile
    httpie is a command-line http client, much like cURL or wget. Written entirely in Python (using requests for the backend and pygments for syntax highlighting) and above that it's working on multiple platforms.

Until next time, code long and prosper!

Stefan

Image credit: Guillaume Kurkdjian