For one of my projects, I use the Media Temple Grid Service for hosting. They offer ssh access to the hosting, which is superb and coupled with svn repositories, enables me to keep all the source there too. Using a nice, secure complex password to log on with the ssh client, my IDE and my …
jQuery Plugin Callbacks and Events
I have written a fair few plugins for jQuery for both work and side projects. As any developer should, I am always trying to improve my techniques for creating them so that they are as efficient and maintainable as possible. Up until recently, my usual technique for callbacks and events would be to include the …
jQuery Inline Confirm
I have been using Delicious social bookmarking service ever since Blinklist degraded and finally lost the plot with their new design. When I first started using Delicious, a feature of their interface really leapt out at me and I could not wait to include it into a project. The feature I am talking about is …
Templating Your ASP.NET Pages
The majority of my ASP.NET development time is spent on web applications. Recently however, I was creating a marketing website to complement one of those applications and realised it required a slightly different approach to that which I was used to – we needed maximum changeability for as little downtime. Switching off the option to …
Creating PDF Documents in PHP Using Tcpdf
When developing websites, it is not going to be too long before you are required to generate a pdf for users to download. One usually searches for a suitable library for this and in php, there are a few options out there. My personal favourite, and one that is still receiving regular updates and improvements, …
The Technical Debt
I have spent the last few days at work doing some intense refactoring of a seemingly complex jQuery plug-in. I managed to cut it down by 140 lines and speed it up immensely. Whilst it would have saved time if I had written the plug-in myself in the first place, I cannot be expected to …
Sorting Elements with jQuery
Whilst refactoring a jQuery plugin today, I came across a method that placed a list item into an unordered list at a specific point, so that all the items remained in alphabetic order. This long method seemed completely convoluted and slow to me and I decided that there must be an easier way to keep …
Easier Cross Browser Testing
Every web developer will spend a sufficient chunk of their time testing and fixing webpages so that they work across as many browsers as possible. We all groan at the mention of IE6, which is here to stay for a little while yet, even with the various efforts to change that.
Is Atlas So New?
Slipping musically into my twitter stream earlier this morning came an excited remark by John Resig. He seemed all hyped about the new Atlas product from 280 North that they announced at Future of Web Apps, Miami. Given John’s reputation in web development, I immediately followed the link and watched the introductory video on the …