First off, let me apologize for the many weeks of no posts. I’ll give you some more information later, but basically I got a new job (yaaaaay) and I had to move about 150 miles to search for apartments and all the stuff that goes with it. That, coupled with no internet connection and being dead broke didn’t leave much time to get on the internet.
It’s no secret that Firebug is a great tool, but did you know that you can do AJAX Debugging with Firebug?
For those of you just wiping the remnants of 2006 out of your eyes welcome to 2007. If it’s January 1st and it’s before daylight I hope you’re just reading this before you go to bed or something, because if you aren’t out with friends partying, I truly feel your pain. lol.
To the rest of you stumbling upon this post at a reasonable hour I have a great way to start out 2007 with some AJAX.
Introduction I must say, JavaScript and I have had our love-hate relationship. Sometimes the reason I love it are the same reasons that I hate it:
Variable Declarations are not necessary It does not compile But officially, does JavaScript suck?
Why JavaScript Sucks Fabien at Chase The Devil uses The Google Web Toolkit as his basis for claiming that it does suck:
Why would GWT be so well acclaimed if JavaScript was a good language.
Introduction SEO Inc offers, guess what, Search Engine Optimization for your website. Their services include:
Natural Search Engine Optimization PPC Advertising Management Web Analytics SEO Copywriting Optimized Press Releases They also have interesting products like an SEO Toolbar, which analyzes SEO of a given website and an Engine Tracker, which tracks the progress of website over time. The toolbar is free and is pretty cool. It gives nice basic information in a convenient toolbar in your browser.
Introduction Dclick Ads is another program, similar to Text Link Ads, where advertisers can buy links on different websites and publishers can sell space on their websites. Right now, since they’ve just launched, there are a number of very small and new websites that you can buy links on, but as time progresses, I’m sure this will pick up.
First Impressions What can I say? It’s another link share program. Their main features include:
Are you one of those guys who just loves the look of Rounded Corners, but doesn’t like the footwork required? It’s your lucky day, sort of.
Rounder corners are developed using, rounded corner images of course, CSS style to set those images as backgrounds, and the content of the box surrounded by a number of divs. You need one div for the content of the box. Then you need two divs above that, for the top corners and two below it, for the bottom corners.
Introduction
Back when I was doing my internship we had a major problem we were trying to solve. The project involved creating a web based terminal emulator using AJAX. Well, it was a little bit more specific than that. It was basically duplicating a specific application in the browser window.
Problem
Sounds all well and good except that this application made heavy use of F Keys, e.g. (F10, F5, F1, etc). Needless to say this would not really be viable in a browser since F1 would call up help, F5 would refresh and F10 would send the cursor to the menu. We had already written a nice enough key handler that worked rather well, with the exception of these F Keys.
JavaScript Solution
After a lot of hacking around I found a way to stop the browser from calling up and propagating those events. My code was, for lack of a better word, nasty; but it did work. It involved a lot of IE/Mozilla workarounds. I recently came across some cleaner code, so here you go:
I know that a lot of you have heard about Picasa. It is a brilliant image manager from Google. It manages all the images on your hard drive, imports everything from your digital camera and all that other cool stuff. They’ve recently added an option called Web Albums. Here you can upload pictures and create a, um, well Web Album. Now from the program you can upload the images.
I’m sorry to Google, but I just thought this was so hilarious.
The day has finally come. Well, it’s tomorrow, but you know what I mean. I am done, done, done, done, done! Words cannot express the joy and elation I feel right now. Throughout the semester I knew this day was coming. I mean, how could I not graduate. But there were just things that made it rather difficult to be happy about. Every time I mention graduation to someone we have the same conversation:
- Person: So you’re graduating in December?
- Me: Yep.
- Person: So you must be really excited, huh?
- Me: I guess so.
- Person: So what are you going to do afterwards?
- Me (Thinking): How the hell should I know? Do you have a rich uncle that owns a company and is willing to give me a job? Because I sure haven’t been successful on the millions of interviews I’ve gone to. Shoot, I guess I’m going to end up working in the mall selling women’s shoes or something.
- Me (Actual response): I’m not sure. I guess try to find a job.
Yes again, I’m late. I’m sorry folks, but here we go.
Once again we bring together JavaScript and CSS to produce amazing results. Notice the header at the top of this website (assuming that I haven’t impulsively changed my theme again)? Nice basic reflection, right? It’s commonly known as the Wet Floor effect. I can just hear the Photoshop folks now, “what’s so impressive about that?”. Well seeing that I lack a lot in the Photoshop field it took me about 30 minutes to get this to look even reasonably good.