From our new daughter, one year at my new job, and my spiritual growth to learning and giving back as a developer, 2014 has been a full, enlightening year. As the year closes, I want to take time to pause, reflect upon, and be thankful for some of its moments.

While reading How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie, I came across a piece, Father Forgets by W. Livingston Larned, and it struck me like a hammer.

A few months ago, I launched the redesign of my website. I enabled HTTPS a week later, and since then I’ve noticed a significant increase in organic searches—both impressions and clicks. Impressions went up by 144% and clicks by 94% on HTTPS.

Today’s culture is intensely interested in and infatuated with the lives of others. With the Internet and social, it takes little effort to find out and keep up with what’s going on around us. Technology is amazing, and I’m thankful it allows us to be and stay connected, but be careful.

If you’re working with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and either need to convert a JSON string to array or object and loop through it or vice-versa, take an array or object and convert it to a JSON string to return, both can be done in PHP or JavaScript.

If you don’t like carrying a lot in your pockets, the Mujjo Leather Wallet Case is for you—it’s designed to carry your iPhone along with a couple of bare essentials like your bank card, ID and cash. It’s slim, functional and beautiful.

If you’re looking for a sleeve for your 13” MacBook, you may want to consider the Folio Sleeve by Mujjo—not only does it protect your MacBook from the perils of the outside world, but it’s also a thing of beauty.

CSS allows you to create animations with transitions and keyframes that once were only possible with JavaScript or Flash. Unfortunately, with CSS there’s no way to perform a callback when an animation is complete. With JavaScript, it’s possible to detect the end of a CSS transition or animation and then trigger a function.

Animating SVG with CSS is like animating any other element with CSS—it can be done with transitions, transforms, and keyframe animations. Once you’re familiar with the markup of an SVG, the rest is fairly straight forward.

To ensure your images are sharp and crisp on retina-enabled devices, you want to serve images that are twice as large and scale them down appropriately; however, keeping mobile users and their limited speeds and data plans in mind, it’s important to only serve retina images on retina-enabled devices or when necessary.

Here’s a quick-and-easy way to do it with just a few lines of vanilla JavaScript or jQuery.