Adaptor, an extensible jQuery content slider
Posted on June 16, 2012 by Phil 18 comments
This jQuery plugin is a free and lightweight content slider for creating cool 3D (and 2D) slideshows for featured content on your website. In older browsers that do not support CSS3 with 3D transitions the plugin detects them and degrades gracefully to a simple transition maintaining the rich user experience for everyone. The plugin is powered by jQuery and CSS and is designed to be easy to add to an existing web page with the minimal effort on the designer or developer’s part. If you are a developer and want to spice things up a bit the plugin exposes a simple API for adding animation effects and extending it’s core functionality with paging controls and feedback indicators.
Posted in HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery, plugins Tagged 3D, CSS, css3, html, JavaScript, jquery 18 Comments
CORS with Ajax (Cross origin resource sharing)
Posted on April 8, 2012 by Phil 1 comment
Cross origin resource sharing (CORS) allows resources from a web server to be accessed from a web page on another domain. The XMLHttpRequest level 2 specification added support for making cross domain requests but it should be noted that this specification is still a working draft. Traditionally I have always made cross domain requests from sites in a two stage process: 1) make a request to the server hosting the local domain for some data which then 2) makes the cross domain request, receives the response and returns this to the client. Now this process has merits, if you are hitting an external API chances are the service providers won’t be too impressed with you making a request for each user that visits your site and may even limit this. I wrote a nice little PHP class that can be used to avoid this by caching results locally but I’m going to pretend this isn’t an issue, just for today.
Posted in HTML5, JavaScript Tagged ajax, cors, HTML5, JavaScript, programming, xhr 1 Comment
From other languages to Ruby
Posted on March 5, 2012 by Phil no comments yet
I recently began reading Seven languages in seven weeks where top of the bill was a chapter on Ruby. I hadn’t been avoiding Ruby up to now I just never saw any need to put it as a priority on my “things to do list.” I have been into Ruby source code before but only to do some tweaking with, for instance, my Sass setup. I’ll admit it right here, right now that all those strange looking :symbols and funny method.names! did take me back a bit and at first glance and some of the Ruby classes I subsequently looked through almost resembled ancient scrolls of hieroglyphs, mythical and full of magic. Turns out, Ruby isn’t so mythical once you get a little better acquainted but one thing is certain and that is; Ruby sure is full of magic and power.
Posted in ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby Leave a comment
Offline files with HTML 5
Posted on February 11, 2012 by Phil 3 comments
I’ve been experimenting with the FileSystem API in Chrome over the last couple of weeks and thought I’d share my musings with a little demo of a file syncing system that I am thinking of using in an application where the user can download a copy of the file, work on it offline and then sync it when connected again. In this post I just want to show the pull side of the sync where the file is downloaded and replicated in the local file system (within the browser) and I’ll follow up with a second post showing the silent sync with the server (push and pull based on last edit timestamp) once I have that part working.
Posted in HTML5, JavaScript Tagged ajax, DOM, HTML5, JavaScript, xhr 3 Comments
XMLHttpRequest Level 2 Ajax library, xhr2-lib
Posted on January 22, 2012 by Phil 2 comments
So a while ago a messed about with the File API and FormData with the XMLHttpRequest Level 2 spec which enables the transfer of binary data and tracking of the upload progress through the XMLHttpRequestUpload object – awesome. I was blown away when I first started messing about with this stuff and support for it now seems to be a little more wide spread, nothing in IE or Opera as of yet but you know life goes on. What I did start to do was abstract some of the code I was messing about with into a little module aptly named xhr2-lib which I’ve grown a bit since and would like to share and hopefully get some feedback.
Posted in JavaScript Tagged ajax, class, JavaScript, programming, xhr 2 Comments
