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 »

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 »

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 »

This article is a continuation to my article about Firebug.  YSlow is an add-on to Firebug that helps developers determine why a site is loading slowly.

After you install YSlow, if you open up Firebug in Mozilla a new tab will now appear called “YSlow”.  The next steps would be to load a web site that you want to check it’s performance.  After the web site has loaded, click the YSlow tab, if the results don’t compile automatically, click the Performance button to run the diagnostics.

The grading is made up of 13 steps.  For each step you receive a grade from A to F.  An overall grade is compiled in the same format. More »

I think a good place to start is to describe one of my favorite tools.  It’s called Firebug, it’s an add-on for Mozilla browsers.

At work, if one of my co-workers comes to me in the J-Block and asks a Javascript or CSS question, before I even consider helping them I ask if they reviewed the styles or the Javascript in Firebug.  9 times out 10 if it’s a really easy answer, you’ll see it almost immediately with the help of Firebug. More »