In a recent iteration of find.ly that I have been working on, I was asked to create a form that is far removed from the look of standard browser form controls. In particular, the dropdown lists look nothing like the native control and could not be reproduced using only css. This led me to the …
jQuery
AjaxQueue and jQuery 1.3
The website that I work on for the majority of my time had been running on the rather out of date jQuery 1.2 for quite some time. I recently found myself with a little bit of downtime and decided it was a good time to see if we could upgrade and take advantage of all …
Cuesheet Maker Bookmarklet for Discogs.com
Yesterday I discovered I had a few albums that had been ripped as a single track. I prefer having individual tracks and usually head on over to cuesheet heaven to look for the appropriate file that allows me to split them up with the awesome Medieval Cue Splitter. However I had a few tracks that …
Facebook-Style Expanding Textboxes With jQuery
I was recently asked to create a textbox that would vertically expand depending on how much was written in it. This style of text box can be seen in the Facebook news feed for writing comments under peoples feed items. When I receive this type of request, I usually begin by researching what existing systems …
The Importance of a Good jQuery Selector
As a technical lead and working in a company that has had rapid expansion in the last six months or so, I have had the job of being a mentor to some of the new employees. I don’t think any of them had used jQuery before and so for every person that arrived, I needed …
jQuery Plugin Callbacks and Events
I have written a fair few plugins for jQuery for both work and side projects. As any developer should, I am always trying to improve my techniques for creating them so that they are as efficient and maintainable as possible. Up until recently, my usual technique for callbacks and events would be to include the …
jQuery Inline Confirm
I have been using Delicious social bookmarking service ever since Blinklist degraded and finally lost the plot with their new design. When I first started using Delicious, a feature of their interface really leapt out at me and I could not wait to include it into a project. The feature I am talking about is …
The Technical Debt
I have spent the last few days at work doing some intense refactoring of a seemingly complex jQuery plug-in. I managed to cut it down by 140 lines and speed it up immensely. Whilst it would have saved time if I had written the plug-in myself in the first place, I cannot be expected to …
Sorting Elements with jQuery
Whilst refactoring a jQuery plugin today, I came across a method that placed a list item into an unordered list at a specific point, so that all the items remained in alphabetic order. This long method seemed completely convoluted and slow to me and I decided that there must be an easier way to keep …