A combination of things

I was tasked last week with building…well, I don’t know what the hell to call it, but at work we named it “the wheel.” Basically, it is a circle with a bunch of gray icons around it. I needed to get them to change to blue, show a larger graphic with additional content, and change to the next icon after a certain amount of time. When one of the icons is clicked though, the animation has to stop, and show whatever content goes with that icon. I used setInterval to accomplish the rotation through the icons, and pretty much the same jQuery I used on the Portfolio Content Gallery I wrote about. You’ll get a better idea of what I am talking about if you see it. I sped up the rotation so you don’t have to wait as long.

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I’m still learning Javascript/jQuery, and I have never used setInterval before, so this was a lesson for me as well. Turns out it is actually pretty easy, but I thought I would show you how to accomplish this so you don’t have to do any ridiculous searches like I did.

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Been very busy

First, apologies to my subscribers for not writing a lot recently, but I have been working some overtime, and redesigning my website’s interior pages. But I was working on my portfolio page and thought I would share what I have done. All in all, it is not overly complicated, but I like that it is clean and simple. You’ll also get to see the beginnings of my redesign of my interior pages (just keep in mind that it is not finished yet). Take a look at my new portfolio page so far:

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I haven’t made a post about jQuery in a while

Which is what made me decide to write my first post of 2011 on it. First, thank you to the people who commented here on The Web Machine in 2010. Also thanks to the over 730 RSS subscribers I have and the 25 or so followers on Twitter. This blog has been up for about a year now, and I look forward to this one. I hate all of you comment spammers though! So huge thanks to Akismet.

Anyway…a while ago I had thought about creating WordPress themes and try my hand at selling them, but it soon became apparent that the market was saturated. I don’t feel like wasting my time right now on putting effort into that. On one of those themes though, while I am not happy with the look, I created a fly-out menu using jQuery that I really liked. I thought I would share that with you since it takes less than 8 lines of code. So take a look at the demo, and then we’ll jump right in.

UPDATE 5/17/11: Removed the position:relative from the li style. It now gets the position:relative in the hover function in jQuery by adding/removing a class ‘addPosition’. This fixes the submenu appearing underneath the main menu in IE7/8. This was only noticable if you started changing the position of the submenu to be overlapping the main menu. My code here assumes you don’t do that, but with the fix it works great in IE7/8.

NOTE: In IE6, only the first level of the fly-out works. The second is cut off, but since most of us our on our way to not supporting it, I didn’t care. If you have the simple solution to fix that, let me know.

Original:
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More stripped down version (asked for in comments and the CSS now shown in sample code below):
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