I would like to know how to make a sliding panel on the left of the screen. The catch is that it shouldn't slide over the page content, but rather pushing the content to the right (eventually hiding a portion of the content).
a great example: the medium.com sliding dashboard (when you click on the logo)
Bonus: I imagine you could do this either in javascript or purely is CSS, which would be better in a Ruby on Rails app?
Check this tutorial http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/08/13/multi-level-push-menu/.
Demo of tutorial here : http://tympanus.net/Development/MultiLevelPushMenu/