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.

Enter JSLint. Think of JSLint as the W3C Validator for JavaScript. If your code passes inspection (you can essentially ignore repeatedly assigned vars), it will pack.

Tonight I’ve had to fix not one, but two jQuery plug-ins to make them available for packing. The first is the preloadCssImages plug-in from the filament group (amazing developers I might add) and the second is FancyBox by some guy called KAC. I’m not calling anyone out, rather hoping to make people aware of JSLint. It only takes a few moments to go through your code, and the result is a much lighter footprint in most cases.

I’ve contacted the creators of their respective plug-ins, but if they don’t post the fixed, here they are:
preloadCssImages
FancyBox

I’ll have another post in the next 24 hours releasing a free wordpress theme, so stay tuned!

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.

You can find the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard Here.

Type the name of your blog in the textbox and click preview. As long as you’re indexed by Google Blog Search, your feed will show up. Don’t worry if it doesn’t though, it’s easy to change the title and feed(s) you want to display.

For instance, if I wanted to get rid of the Twitter flash widget to the right here and replace it with the vertical feed widget from Google I would simply look in the code for this (assuming I had just generated one for my blog of course):

title: 'Greg-J',
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/Greg-jcom?format=xml'

and change it to

title: 'Twitter',
url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14853318.atom'

And it would display a nice little feed of my most recent tweets in the right column of this site. Doing so however, I would also find that the style of my theme makes it look ulgy and I would have to go back to the flash widget until I had time to style it nicely…

Note:
I just realized that by typing twitter grilla it pulled up my twitter feed, so I’m assuming it’ll find your twitter feed by simply typing in twitter username too.

I kid you not, it wasn’t more than a week ago I was thinking to myself “I need to make a service that creates cool ajax feed widgets for people to display” - so when I saw this today I had to share it. I’ll definitely be integrating these into the new profiles on MySpace Pros.

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.

Once you’re logged in, it works like this:
You set up a site like you would in any other IDE. Tell it the name of the site, FTP info and where your root folder is. Anyone who has used DreamWeaver or something similar to create a Project/Site won’t have any issues here. No software is installed on your server and nothing runs on their server, which is where I have a problem with them call this a content management system. It’s more like a RCE (remote content editor).

For every file you want to be able to edit with Cushy CMS you must first create the file in your offline editor and apply the class “cushycms” to any section of the page you want to edit. You can make the heading and content editable or the whole damn page, it’s up to you. Once you do this and upload the file you’ll be able to log into Cushy CMS and edit those sections from there using their simple (read: vanilla) WYSIWYG editor.

That’s it. That is Cushy CMS. Well, mostly.

The value in Cushy CMS - it’s free by the way - is in that you can create these simple sites for clients and then give them access to edit their sites. Giving them access is as stupid easy as creating an account as well. The downside to this free account is that they go to cushycms.com to log in and see the cushycms branding. Somewhat unprofessional, no? The $28 a month pro account however, gives you completely white-label branding and allows you to assign it to any domain of your choice. You don’t get the software, but it’s on your domain with your logo and to your clients it just looks like you have your stuff together.

My opinion of Cushy CMS is that it fills a niche very well. These guys saw a whole in the market and gobbled it up. The interface is nice and it just works. It’s easy to understand and easy to implement (albeit time consuming). However, it is not - in my opinion - a CMS. It allows you to edit content on a per-page basis. The content has to physically exist on your server and it’s all static unless you build yourself a flatfile CMS of your own (if you want one, I’ve got one I use personally. Comment below and I’ll send it to your email address). Cushy CMS isn’t going to replace WordPress, but for what it is, it’s great.

One of the things I do when I need a break is work on side-projects that have little-to-no practical use but help to make a better developer. Every now and again one of those little side projects proves to be somewhat useful. Such is the case with sitesixteen’s web master marketplace.

The app is pretty self explanatory and while there are some additions and changes I’d like to make to it I’m not going to spend anymore time on it unless people actually use it.

Web Master Marketplace

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)

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.

So today I get a message from a developer and good friend of mine Tully that simply said “I found the best PHP IDE EVER. It’s like Zend, but not sh*t. It’s called PHPEd“ I took notice because that’s pretty good praise from him as he’s a bit on the cynical side. So I checked it out. The first thing I have to say is this:

I will never use another IDE for Web Development again.

There is nothing this IDE doesn’t do. For starters, the code completion and syntax highlighting which are my two biggest concerns are excellent and highly configurable (much like the entire IDE). The project management (including FTP) is top notch as well. You can assign different projects to the same domain with different subdirectories which is a feature I’ve never seen before. If this is all it did I would have switched just for these features. The implementation of these features is that good. Some of the things I wasn’t expecting was:

• Built-in SSH (being logged into the server you’re working on in a tab right next to the site you’re working on is priceless). I used to use a great program for this called SecureCRT (think putty, but better acct. management and a tabbed interface), but now I don’t need to have a separate application open just to log into a server. Depending on the kind of developer you are, this is a huge feature.
• Built in php4 and php5 engines running simultaneously. To top it off, it won’t have any effect on any other instances of php running on your machine - which is important because I use wamp5 religiously (who wants to have to upload a file every time they want to see their changes live?).
• Built in preview for IE and FireFox. Everyone has IE preview in their IDE, but the FireFox preview is a real gem in this genre of software. Aptana had it, but last I checked installing it was a pain (that may have changed now that it’s not beta). With PhpEd, it was a check box during install.

Those are the features that really stuck out for me. I would suggest anyone give it a try, you might be surprised. You’ll probably want to hit the Settings and spend a good amount of time in there as a lot of things just don’t feel right out-of-the-box. The delay for code completion (which is the best I’ve ever seen) needs to be reduced and some of the editor options should be played with to get the right feel, but overall I would give it 5 out of 5 stars. It is, by any measure, the perfect Web Development IDE. Period.

Spiffy Corners has actually been around for a long time, but I’m just now getting my blog setup and I need some content to get it going. It’s really nothing more than a generator for pure CSS rounded corners, but a lot of people have found it incredibly useful. For a long time Youtube mentioned Spiffy Corners in the source code of every page they generated. This latest version includes an improved color picker, a new design and a selectable radii of 3px, 5px or 9px (as of right now they are not integrated yet).

I know this solution is semantically bankrupt and purists loathe it’s very existence, but for many Spiffy Corners is the answer to the anti-aliased css corner question. I’ll post an update when I have the time to update the code to work with the radii, but for now it only outputs 5px corners.