Blogging…all in a night’s work!

July 21st, 2010
Blogging…all in a night’s work!

It’s not just publish and you’re done

Tonight I thought I would take you through what it actually takes to blog. I mean the day to day crap. If you think it’s just write a post, publish and done, then you are seriously mistaken. There is a ton of other things involved that go on to keep a blog going. I’m proud of what I have accomplished so far, but there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes here at The Web Machine, and I’m sure almost any other blog that has effort behind it. Besides the writing, there is the constant tinkering, rearranging, testing, security, moderating…the list goes on and on.

So if you are thinking about starting your own web development blog, read on, and then see if you are up to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using jQuery’s hover() event to the fullest

July 20th, 2010
Using jQuery’s hover() event to the fullest

The problem

Today at work I was given the task of using jQuery to create a very specific effect. I have an unordered list with three list items. When the user rolls over one of them, the item gets a class which sets the background to a new color, while any other item that has that class, has it removed. On top of that, if the container the list is in loses focus (meaning the cursor leaves the container), the last list item hovered on should retain the background changing class. On top of THAT, whenever one of those said list items is hovered over, one of three content divs below it should go from hidden to visible. Oh, and I have to have the second item started off as looking like the hover state. This one took me a while to figure out. I could get the normal rollover, but the keeping the class thing when the list item lost focus through me for a loop.

Click here to take a look at the final working jQuery. You’ll see what I was trying to do if you roll over and out and what not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paprika to get organized, Microdata, and ranting

July 15th, 2010

Get organized

Paprika logo Let’s start with Paprika. I know in my post “Creating your own web dev tool kit – Part III: Apps that help” I told you about todotweet.com. It is still a great little twitter app, but I have found that Paprika suits me better. It is just another little note taker type thing that lets me create projects with to do lists in them.

Paprika screenshot

As you can see from this little screen I have a project name of The Web Machine, an h1 tag that is the Things to do…, 3 tags (Design, Coding, and Articles), and something to do under each. Paprika is so easy to use, and along with the base amount of features that I want, I’ve made it my new to do list app. You do have to create an account, which is also stupid easy (like 4 fields to enter), after which they give you your own url. Login, and you are off.

Read the rest of this entry »

Real example of jQuery’s replaceWith()…and Ext’s method

July 14th, 2010

What the hell is Ext?

That is what you are asking yourself, right? It’s another javacsript library, which I have gotten into many an argument over why one would use it over another library. Personally, I find it to be more like writing straight javacsript (which I suck at). My point isn’t to get you to use it, because I don’t care. I love jQuery, and that is that. I’ll show you the difference in this post/article between how jQuery would do something versus how Ext would do it, because I HAD to do it in Ext. On to what I had to accomplish.

The Problem

Here is the set up: I have a hard-coded div with two links in it, I am not allowed to touch the actual HTML page itself (meaning the myPage.html), but I do have to change the href of the first link, and the text that displays in it.

For you jQuery newbies, I’m going to be using first() and replaceWith() to do this, and you will be amazed by the simplicity of it. Because I am not all that familiar with Ext Core javascript library, I actually had to write this in jQuery first and then translate it over. This though is much easier than when I tried doing that with my slider.

Read the rest of this entry »

How to control CSS3 Radial Gradients

July 9th, 2010

Finally, something not so outrageous using CSS3 that we can all understand

I got a link through twitter about a raindrop done using CSS (don’t bother looking at this in Safari or Chrome, because he write the additional CSS for that). Normally this is the kind of thing that I will look at and say cool, but waste of time. This one caught my eye though because it is actually pretty simple. I’m not going to recreate the damn thing, but all it is, is a bunch of divs and a surprisingly small amount of CSS. I was actually impressed with this one, and I think it could have been done with just an ul and list items. Now, I would still use an image in a real life situation, but I picked this piece because I did not really know how to use the new gradients. This guy obviously does.

Learnin’

That led me to do some small bit of research and tests, and found it is not all that hard, just slightly confusing to get a grasp of what the numbers do. On top of that, the CSS Safari uses to do radial gradients is pretty different.

Some things to note about Safari while doing my demo. I could not get it to recognize percentages for the values in the border radius, so I had to do pixels. I’m not sure it can or not, and I didn’t find anything about it. Safari 5 does not need -webkit- in front of border-radius – it will still use it, so I would include it anyway to support the older versions.

If you look at the demo, you can see a div with a basic radial gradient, with rounded corners set to 100% in FF, and 300px in Safari. This should appear as a circle with red in the middle, then orange fading out to yellow. The second, is just to show you something easy to do with it. It is a png with the word GRADIENT cut out of it, and a drop shadow layer style put on. It then has a div behind it with a radial gradient, which if you ever wanted to change the colors, you wouldn’t have to use photoshop to do it. Just change the CSS!

Click here for demo.

Read the rest of this entry »