First let me say I’m sorry it has been a few days since my last blog post. I was summoned for jury duty, and then my kids were dealing with being sick over the weekend. Rough ride since last Thursday. On the plus side with the jury duty thing, I did get to read a lot of my jQuery 1.3 book (I know, stop telling me about 1.4…that book isn’t out yet!).
Now…the plug-in. This is an extension for Firebug – FireQuery. Watch the screen cast they have on that page to see what it does. Seems cool. You can inject jQuery onto any page you want. Even if it doesn’t have it.
Next on the list, I suggest reading this article over at Nettuts. VERY basic stuff, but it shows you, through Firebug’s console, how bad coding habits can really start to drag your load time down. I’ll give you one quick example of what the author goes into, so you will know if you want to go check it out.
console.profile() ;
$(".selected");
console.profileEnd();According to the article, this will take .308 ms. While this:
console.profile() ;
$("li.selected");
console.profileEnd();Will take .291 ms. “So the hell what,” you say. I agree…milliseconds?? Who cares? Now take a .js page full of jQuery, and a website that has hundreds, if not thousands of nodes. jQuery has to go through all that crap to find it. But the more specific you are, the quicker the response. I’m not a complete noob in jQuery, but I didn’t know that it would compound that much. Now that I do, I will be WAAAAY more descriptive with my coding. If that interests you, I suggest reading the full article. If all you do is read my post here, then I think the above alone, will help your coding practices and the performance of your web pages.
