object oriented blogs

In a recent post, I wrote that developers should better optimize their JavaScript. Well, that's easier said than done, so I'd like to get down to the nitty-gritty and talk specifically about optimizing jQuery. Please note that this is not about performance tuning of the jQuery library, rather it is about better engineering the code we use to interact with it. If you're not a jQuery programmer, and you have no interest in joining the fad, don't worry—most of the concepts here apply to JavaScript and general programming as well. 1. Beware of class-only selectors A great part about using a JavaScript library like jQuery is its selectors. ... (more...)

While doing some WordPress customization recently, I ran into a problem forcing lower case output for the month headers in my blog archives. It seems like a simple task but it turns out the WordPress templating engine prevents you from returning any strings from functions while within a template. You can use all the PHP you want, and call any function you want, but the functions in the end work by echo'ing out a result, rather than returning it. This seems like a pretty good security move, but it turns out to be pretty annoying when you're used to object oriented code and you want to do something simple like make an outputted date string into lower ... (more...)