End Your If

At my work, whenever we have a link to delete records, we always have a simple Javascript confirm dialog pop-up.  The confirm dialog just does the standard, “Are you sure you wish to delete this record?” with an OK and Cancel button.  If the user clicks cancel, the record is not deleted, if they click OK, the record will be deleted.

If you’ve done some Facebook development, you will notice quickly that the alert() and confirm() functions do not work.  I’ve found this slightly annoying, so I’ve written a very simple Javascript function that let’s me use the nifty dialogs that Facebook provides us. More »

Recently at work, we’ve started diving into Google Gadgets.  They are quite fun and really extremely easy to build.  In this article, I’m going to get you started creating your very own Google Gadget.

Sit back and reserve a few minutes of your time and you will be well on your way in no time! More »

It feels like it has been a lifetime since my last blog!  I must apologize for the long delay, but between finding the time and finding a good topic to blog about, it’s being difficult.

In today’s article, it’s been a while since I’ve needed to use either the setTimeout or setInterval functions and it seems many people are not familiar with the setInterval function.

Let’s start by describing the two. More »

About two years ago I started learning AJAX and drag and drop.  The first project I applied it to was an existing project that was using Prototype and Scriptaculous.  So, I didn’t really have a choice as to what library I was going to use.

Two years later, I do not know Jquery all that well, but I am absolutely falling in love with.  Doing things with Jquery seem to be 10 times easier to me.

I always struggled with the each() function that I seemed to be constantly using with Prototype.  Jquery seems to understand this and simplify things for us.

In this article, I’m going to describe my top reasons why I am becoming a Jquery lover over Prototype. More »

One of my first articles discussed YSlow.  An excellent Mozilla add-on to help you understand why your web page may be loading slowly.

In that article, I describe the importance of gzip, minify, and grouping your Javascript and CSS code into one file each.

Just recently I was surfing CakePHP’s bakery and found a nice add-on to simplify the process and make it super easy. More »

CakePHP offers a really nice built-in tree management.  In fact, at a bare minimum you simply need to create a table with 2 extra columns, tell your model to act like a “tree” and rather than doing a find(‘all’) you do a generatetreelist() or a find(‘threaded’) and CakePHP takes care of the rest.

After doing a quick test, I was quite impressed with what CakePHP did for me, but I was not satisified.  I wanted to create a really slick category management system that I can re-use and show off.  Well, in this tutorial I go about 90% of the way.  The only thing I didn’t have time to finish was, rather than redrawing my tree through AJAX, use DHTML and dynamically update my tree after dragging and dropping.  Don’t worry, I plan to finish this with a part two soon. More »

Every year at Halloween, my company offers prizes to the best dressed employees.  For the past two years I have one as well as my co-worker that partakes in our crazy costumes.  You may be wondering what this has to do with drag and drop, don’t worry I’m getting there.

This years prize happened to be a monkey slingshot.  Basically you place your index and middle fingers in pockets attached to the monkey’s arms.  You then proceed to pull back and let fly.  Well, as you can imagine, we had a lot of fun with this guy, so much fun in fact we broke it

So one day after work I was messing around with drag and drop and some jquery animations.  I was quickly able to get a “mock slingshot” shooting at a target and this is what I want to share today. More »

Recently on a project I was working on, I was tasked with fixing drag and drop that was terribly slow.  The drag and drop was implemented with scriptaculous on a calendar system.  When you clicked an event to drag it it took about 5 seconds before the page would actually let you drag it!  This was clearly unacceptable and it has to be possible because Google Calendar is lightening fast.

 The first thing I did was download and setup jquery to see if it was related to how scriptaculous was created.  After setting up jquery, it was just as slow.  This lead me to believe that it was a fundamental problem with how the drag and drop was set up in both libraries. More »

I’m guessing I probably got your attention with this one?  I’m also guessing that you cannot scroll down fast enough to the comments box and start typing a bunch of nasty messages to me.

WAIT!  Before you do that, let me explain why. More »

At my work it’s quite clear to me that a lot of people have difficulty with both AJAX and drag and drop functionality.  In this article, I thought I would provide a realistic and simplistic example of how to accomplish both AJAX and drag and drop together.

By the end of this article you will be able to create an extremely slick content management system that works really smoothly. More »