One of my new favorite blogs to read is jQuery for designers. Mainly because the guy who runs it seems to have the same obsession for the very design elements I do and partly because he’s better at jQuery than I am and I learn something every article I read (or watch, he offers screencasts for every article which is… mmm… unique).
One of the many techniques I have needed for this next wordpress theme I’m releasing is a fading hover effect. You can see it used on Dragon Labs as well as the jQuery UI site. Unfortunately the only site is done in degradable and semantic way is Dragon Labs, but Anand doesn’t have his code readily available and I haven’t talked to him in years. So… I tore into the code available from jqueryfordesigners…
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This is a small post made in hopes it reaches a JavaScriptdeveloper, who in turn passes it along to another, then another, so-on-and-so-forth…
I use jQuery with nearly every project. While I find it easier and easier to roll my own JavaScript, I’m not one for reinventing the wheel. If a plug-in exists that does what I want, I’ll use it. The first thing I do is check if they have a packed version (size matters). If not, I pack my own. My problems start when developers don’t have a packed version already available. Chances are, if they don’t have a packed version available, it’s because the JavaScript packer breaks their code. Not because it’s bad code, and not because there is something wrong with Dean Edwards packer, but because when code is packed certain operations are changed if the code isn’t written perfectly.
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I’m tired of using the word “awesome” to describe things that are awesome so I went with majestic instead. Awesome, huh?
Rather than get techy about Google’s new AJAX Feed API I’ll focus on their much easier to understand wizard for creating a very simple AJAX Feed widget. To do that though, I need to cover the AJAX Feed API so much to say that it’s a way for you display snippets of an RSS Feed – or multiple RSS Feeds – on your website without doing anything more than click a button.
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This is the second time I’ve written this article so it’ll be much shorter now. Damn you back button!
I’ve been using vBulletin to create a webmaster social network at MySpacePros.com for the past month now and while it has all the features I need, I can’t imagine using vB for a social network that wasn’t aimed towards webmasters. As awesome as it is, it’s a beast to work with. What would I use then? WordPress. Or more specifically, BuddyPress. Take that last sentence with a grain of salt though, because I’ve never actually seen it in action. This is all just speculation.
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This is an update to a post made earlier today.
Last week I posted a Cushy CMS review that received quite a bit of attention. A few people expressed interest in the flat file CMS that I mentioned I use internally, so I wanted to post it. From this point on I’ll refer to it ask Skeleton.
You can grab it here: Skeleton: flat file CMS
Cushy CMS bills itself as an online content manager created to “take the work out of managing content” that is “Super. Easy. To. Use.”.
Account creation takes less than 30 seconds from start to logged in. They score big points from me on this. Had it not been so fast I wouldn’t be doing this review. Anything that makes me click a link from my email to verify an account and then manually enter my login details irritates me enough to pass it by completely. You can get signed up and start using it faster than you can type this sentence.
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In the process of writing the new WebMaster Marketplace over at MySpacePros I used InnerFade for jQuery and realized it wouldn’t work when it was packed with Dean Edward’s packer. I found the issue and fixed it (just a missing semi-colon), but contacting the creator didn’t go so well (Anyone speak German?) so I figured I’d post the fix here. That and it’s been a while since my last post.
If you’re wondering, it’s line 69. $.innerfade = function() {} should be $.innerfade = function() {};. If it’s not, it won’t compress.
Download InnerFade for jQuery (fixed and packed)
It’s been a week or so since my last entry and for the sake of keeping the momentum going I’ll write about one of my upcoming projects, tentatively called cart.
In my opinion there just isn’t a great solution for those people who want to sell digital goods online. There are numerous solutions, but of the dozen or so I have used I don’t really like any of them. So naturally, I’ve commissioned my own.
Here’s a sneak peak into a piece of software I’m think is going to be big. The development version is off-site as I don’t want anyone messing with it, deleting customers, that sort of thing – but I do have examples of the front and back ends up.
The first template can be seen here. I haven’t had the time to put it into code, but the overall look and feel is there. I’ve had to start over 3 times on this layout because I’m trying to make one that is plain so it’s easy for people to edit but my creative side is getting in the way still. I’ll probably get someone else to make a theme since I can’t seem to focus on a generic one.
The admin side is much more complete. You can get a good idea of the functionality from these pages:
Questions, comments, feature requests. I’m all ears.
About once a year I’ll spend a day – sometimes two – evaluating IDE’s. I’ve been using Dream Weaver for the longest time, but for me it’s basically a glorified text editor with half decent code completion and syntax highlighting I’ve grown accustom to. It has almost no features I would like and my main complaint is it completely taxes one of my cores. I didn’t buy a quad core processor so a text editor could use 25% of my available horsepower even when it’s sitting idle.
Earlier this year I found the new – and always free – Aptana. Overall it’s good software. I wouldn’t say great, but it’s good. The problem with it also lies in its strength: It’s written in Java. It can be used on any platform, but it can be painfully slow when double clicking on files in the file browser and that’s a deal-breaker for me. It has some interesting features (like built-in FireFox preview) and for those looking to save their pennies, it’s by far your best option. I spent a few days here and there with it, but it never stuck. I spent a lot of time trying to configure it, but it just never felt comfortable.
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This is a very early version of what will become a class for dealing with url rewriting. I spent some time looking for url handling classes and while I found one I really like, it was just too much for what I needed in this case. Keep in mind the only thing this piece of code does right now is create an array. I’ve called this array $_PATH as it seemed to make sense considering its purpose and how it’s derived.
The .htaccess file is as follows:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
Rewriterule (.*) index.php
This will take any request url and forward it to index.php leaving the URI intact. You can change index.php to anything you like and it does work in subdirectories.
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