I was talking JavaScript with Scott Hanselman recently, discussing different approaches to client-side development and the complications that surround them. Part way through, he decided that we, along with Elijah Manor, should sit down and make a podcast out of it.

So, we did.

It was just a touch nerve wracking to sit down and record with no agenda, firm topic, or preparation, but Scott’s a pro and guided us smoothly through. Within an hour of him saying “let’s record a podcast,” he had pulled recording equipment and a quiet room out of thin air, and we were finished.

If you’re a regular reader here, the discussion may be below your level of expertise, but it potentially good for sharing with colleagues who aren’t yet at your level on the client-side.

You can listen to it here: <JavaScript and jQuery: Moving beyond Alert() />

Also be sure to check out Elijah’s summary of what we talked about, which includes links to most of the resources we discussed: Hanselminutes #256: JavaScript & jQuery: Moving beyond Alert()

It’s December 21st as I write this, which means it’s time for my yearly recap and a recounting of this year’s most popular posts. The way 2010 began, it threatened to be a tough fourth year of Encosia, but has eventually turned out to be a great year in the end.

Encosia-related metrics are up across the board, from page views, to RSS subscribers, to Twitter followers. In fact, the site has served right at one and a quarter million page views to JavaScript-enabled, human visitors in the past year. That’s chump change for a lot of larger sites, but it’s a number that’s truly hard for me to fathom in the context of my paltry trickle of niche content.

The year wasn’t all smooth sailing though…

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526 entries later, it’s time to announce the winners of the 2010 Encosia Holiday Giveaway. Without further ado:

• One free month at TekPub: afasyah, tdryan, and Zoran (Comment).
• One free year at TekPub: James Sheldon (TekPub Voting).
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN: Richard Kimber (Comment).

Congratulations! I’m contacting each of you right now via email or Twitter to get your prizes to you. If you haven’t received anything from me in the next 24 hours, please get in touch with me directly to be sure my attempt wasn’t marked as spam or otherwise thwarted.

I want to thank my friends James and Rob at TekPub for providing the TekPub memberships, and of course Microsoft for providing the MSDN subscription.

Finally, I want to thank everyone for participating. The topic suggestions, both in comments and the TekPub voting area have been even higher quality than I had expected. You can be sure that your feedback will influence what you read here and see at TekPub over the course of the next year.

Each year around the 21st of December, I’ve ended the year with a brief recap and a list of the year’s most popular posts. That has worked well in the past, but this year I find myself in the position to give more than just information back to the community. So, as I close in on my fourth full year here at Encosia, I’m going to try something a bit different this time around.

This year, I’m going to precede that yearly recap giving away some great prizes, including a full free year at TekPub and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with a year-long subscription to the MSDN library.

Additionally, I know that many of you will already be spending time offline with your friends and family by the 21st of December. So, I’m also going to move things up a bit this year to make sure that everyone’s able to participate.

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Last Friday, the “final” two episodes of Mastering jQuery went live: Using Custom Events and Upgrading to jQuery 1.4. While we’ll almost certainly add another episode when jQuery 1.5 is released, we’ve covered what we set out to.

Weighing in at nearly six hours of video, we covered a wide range of content, and have had overwhelmingly positive feedback on the series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episodes as much as we’ve enjoyed recording them.

I want to thank those of you who helped promote Mastering jQuery through Twitter, word of mouth, and other avenues. It became one of the most viewed series on TekPub, and that couldn’t have happened without your help and support.

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I recently encountered what appeared to be a cross-browser issue with jQuery, which was both surprising and frustrating. After all, eliminating those cross-browser inconsistencies is no small part of jQuery’s fundamental appeal.

After some investigation, the source of the trouble actually stemmed from an oversight on my part. I doubt that many of you will have to deal with exactly the same situation, but the lessons I learned may apply to cross-browser jQuery problems you encounter in the future.

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If you follow me on Twitter, this stack of free TekPub trials may look familiar:

Each card is redeemable for a one-month membership at TekPub, which allows free, unrestricted access to all of the videos on the site. Of course, that also includes access to my TekPub series, Mastering jQuery.

I’ve given many of them away at events like MIX10 and ReMIX Atlanta 2010, but made sure to reserve some of them for you. After all, there would be no Mastering jQuery series without you.

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I spent some quality time with Dave Reed’s latest revision of John Resig’s jQuery.tmpl plugin recently, migrating a small project from jTemplates. Since both the jQuery team and Microsoft team have requested feedback on jQuery.tmpl, I decided to write about my experience using it (as I am wont to do with these templating proposals).

Overall, jQuery.tmpl is a great step in the right direction. It’s small, it’s simple, and it’s fast. Overloading append() to allow the append(Template, Data) syntax is phenomenal. That approach feels more like idiomatic jQuery than anything else I’ve used, including jTemplates.

However, if this template rendering engine is going to succeed broadly, I feel there’s one important feature still missing. Additionally, there are a couple ancillary features that are present in the current proposal, but should be protected.

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An overwhelming majority of people who end up on my site only view a single page per visit. In fact, you’ll probably do the same. As I’ve come to realize: that’s okay.

I didn’t always think it was okay though. Throughout most of 2007, that caused me a great deal of concern. I’d been reading too many blogs about blogging, was convinced that persuading you to click through multiple pages was essential to the site’s success, but wasn’t able to make that happen here

Ultimately, the number of pageviews wasn’t very worrisome, because the site continued to grow. What did frustrate me was the impact that single-view visits have on a more important metric.

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On this day in 2006, I wrote and published a short post here about something that had eluded my attempts at searching for an answer. I thought that archiving the information online might help if I needed to find it again later, and that it might help anyone else who had been similarly unable to track down the answer.

Three years later, the site has served over one million page views to JavaScript enabled browsers in the last year alone, and thousands of you keep tabs on the site’s updates through RSS, email, and/or Twitter.

One step at a time, it’s astonishing just how far this thing has come.

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