Archive for the ‘front-end’ Category
January 5th, 2010
Remember the code from Contra on original Nintendo? Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start; it’s also known as the Konami Code and the 30 Lives Code.
This famous sequence of buttons from the 80’s isn’t going anywhere: in more recent times it’s been in a Moldy Peaches song, and used as an easter egg in Google Reader and Facebook, to name a few.
But I’m sure tons of great things can still be done with the code from Contra, so I built it into a simple jQuery plugin that can be easily used on any site.
The jQuery Contra Plugin allows you to call a function of your choice whenever a user enters the Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter).
Download the Contra Plugin
Read the jQuery Contra docs
How to use … Read more…
Tags: code, downloads, easter egg, freebies, javascript, jQuery, Nintendo, plugins, pop culture, throwbacks, video games
Posted in front-end, jQuery Plugins | 5 Comments
December 22nd, 2009
In Javascript it often makes sense to attach a stylesheet rather than style a bunch of individual attributes. Appending a stylesheet to the DOM has a number of advantages:
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Stylesheets can be easier to work with than Javascript—it’s just more natural to use CSS syntax for styling.
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It’s nice to avoid the cross-browser headaches associated with Javascript styling. Compare CSS’s simple float: left to Javascript’s style.styleFloat = ‘left’ and style.cssFloat = ‘left’.
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Appending a stylesheet is better for performance when styling 15 or more elements.
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CSS allows you to leverage pseudo-classes and define styles with the simple a:hover selector instead of both onmouseover and onmouseout event listeners.
There are a couple ways to append a stylesheet. Although it’s usually best to attach an external stylesheet, there are times when you need to build a stylesheet on the fly with Javascript. Let’s walk through the code we’ll need to append … Read more…
Tags: append, best practices, cross-browser, CSS, DOM, front-end, javascript, on-the-fly, unobtrusive, web standards, webdev
Posted in front-end | 7 Comments
December 8th, 2009
TranslateThis is a new Javascript widget that provides 52 languages of translation by leveraging the Google Language API.
Installing TranslateThis couldn’t be easier—simply copy and paste the widget code anywhere on your website, you don’t have to upload any files or change any settings.
Besides being easy to use, TranslateThis also provides many attractive features for developers. First off, requests to the Language API run in Javascript, so the translation is pretty fast. Additionally, the script is lightweight, weighing in at just over 11kb with another 7kb of imagery. And since it doesn’t depend on any Javascript library, TranslateThis can be implemented on any website without additional overhead. Finally, TranslateThis has been tested in all modern browsers and its user interface is designed to be straightforward and seamless.
What can you customize in TranslateThis?
Tags: AJAX, analytics, cross-browser, customization, downloads, front-end, javascript, performance, plugins, translation, web design, webdev, widgets
Posted in front-end, webdev | 3 Comments
September 14th, 2009
For the past couple years jQuery has been gaining in popularity, from a hot script with easy CSS selectors released by John Resig in 2006, all the way to jQuery 1.3.2, probably the most widely used Javascript library today. The jQuery core has been constantly expanding, offering new methods and performance tuning with every release, in addition to the wide variety of jQuery plugins that are released almost daily.
Known for publishing resources for the latest development trends, Packt Publishing has recently released an updated version their jQuery book: Learning jQuery 1.3, by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg of Learning jQuery (the website). This new resource provides an excellent introduction to jQuery as well as going into detail on some of its finer topics. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who is fairly new to jQuery—it will give you a great head start in … Read more…
Tags: best practices, books, jQuery, resources, reviews
Posted in front-end | 1 Comment
June 15th, 2009
YouTubin’ is a jQuery plugin that makes embedding YouTube videos clean, easy and unobtrusive. In its simplest form, YouTubin’ grabs any links that point to a YouTube page and replaces them with an embedded video. To do so, YouTubin’ leverages SwfObject 2 if available, but otherwise just embeds the video through standard markup.
Advanced options include flagging specific video elements using a jQuery selector and setting a variety of swf properties such as dimensions, flash version, flashvars and params. Youtubin’ can even be used to cause the video to embed once a link is clicked rather than when the page loads.
Download YouTubin’ jQuery Plugin
Tags: best practices, clean markup, downloads, jQuery, plugins, unobtrusive, video, youtube
Posted in front-end | 13 Comments
March 24th, 2009
It’s time for developers to stop complaining about web typography. Custom font embedding has been around for years, and it has finally gotten to the point that typography nerds can be equally happy with the fonts on a website as they are with the Photoshop comps. Many of the things that were a total pain to support previously have become a piece of cake. Leading, kerning, and all the major typography buzzwords have been handled for some time. Even drop shadows and Photoshop-style font rasterization options such as ‘strong’ and ‘crisp’ are now fully supportable.
So let’s make sure that we don’t become dinosaur developers, and get up on these modern methods of custom font embedding.
In this article we'll cover all types of font embedding, from older image replacement methods to embedding fonts with Flash, as well as native browser methods and even full Javascript … Read more…
Tags: best practices, cross-browser, CSS, flash, front-end, ImageMagick, javascript, licensing, typography, w3c, web design, web history, webdev
Posted in front-end | 29 Comments
January 30th, 2009
When I started developing I was fortunate enough to have an experienced friend who pointed me to all the right articles, websites, etc. The right tools make all the difference and this educational jumpstart was exactly what I needed to hit the ground running.
Now that I’ve gathered a good deal of Javascript knowledge and used a wide variety of Javascript resources, I’d like to share these so that others can experience the same benefit I did. And don’t stop reading if you already know Javascript inside and out: there’s resources here for all skill levels, from noob to pro.
1. Mozilla Developer Center
The Mozilla Development Center should be your starting point for all things Javascript.
Beginners should start with the Core Javascript Guide. Javascript can be a really confusing language at first and going through each of these pages will make you comfortable with Javascript’s peculiar syntax … Read more…
Tags: best practices, books, education, front-end, javascript, jQuery, resources
Posted in front-end | 9 Comments
October 20th, 2008
QuickFlip is a jQuery plugin I wrote that uses a CSS trick to cause a div, paragraph or any other piece of HTML markup to flip like a card. With a result similar to the UI animation on the iPhone, this jQuery plugin is easily integrated into your webpage to make any portion appear to flip and show its back.
When a flip occurs, the front panel is split in half with Javascript. The right and left halves slide into one another, and afterwards the opposite occurs with the back panel. While it's not as smooth as some Flash animation, it all happens so quickly that it really looks like the panel is flipping over (more…)
Tags: animation, CSS, downloads, front-end, jQuery, plugins, web design, webdev, widgets
Posted in front-end | 37 Comments
August 27th, 2008
Inevitably, when finishing development of a front-end, I find myself going through the painstaking process of cleaning up extraneous CSS styles. This style was for debugging, this block was for a page that got nixed, this piece I used when conceptualizing the site another way: I don’t think it’s possible to develop a website without removing some styles at the end. Dreading another round of CSS cleanup, I considered programming a tool to spider a site and tell me which parts of the stylesheets were used. It seemed a daunting task so I checked online, and sure enough, someone had already developed it, and far better than I could have. The tool I found, Dust-Me Selectors, is a Firefox extension that makes cleaning up CSS a snap. It can spider an entire site or a group of pages to determine which CSS blocks are unused … Read more…
Tags: CSS, front-end, plugins, workflow
Posted in front-end
