FerretArmy: A Web Developer's Paradise

Pushing the Web Forward, Since 2007

Entries for the ‘WebDev’ Category

Musings on SPDY Protocol

So, yet another week, and another fairly large announcement from Google. They’ve been coming pretty fast and furious lately – the open-sourcing of both Closure and Chrome OS are two fairly recent developments. However, the one this post will focus on is the announcement that Google is working on a new application-level protocol, dubbed SPDY.
SPDY [...]

Google Closure

Google just open sourced Closure, their robust JavaScript library. Closure is used in a variety of Google products, notably GMail and Google Docs. I had a chance to play with it for a few minutes, and I’m posting my first impressions.
Google Closure is a fairly complete JavaScript framework. In that sense, it duplicates a lot [...]

Cross Domain AJAX with CSSHttpRequest

Normally, AJAX is limited to retrieving data on the same domain that served the page. This is a limitation of the XMLHttpRequest, done mostly for security purposes. There are several ways to get around this limitation, of course, using a variety of methods and techniques. This is one of the stranger that I’ve come across [...]

jQuery UI Image Carousel

I’ve just released my latest plugin, the jQuery UI Image Carousel! The plugin is a standard-fare image carousel, and it’s also fully compatible with jQuery UI. It’s got a few options that make it fairly versatile – from a minimal look all the way to a collapsible version with a custom header.
The JavaScript itself wasn’t [...]

Disabling Button Clicks The Better Way

Most of the time when you want to cancel an action on a web page, such as a button click, you’d return false in the client-side button event handler, as such:
<a href=”blah…” onclick=”return DoAction();”>Link</a>

function DoAction() { /*Do Something */ return false; };
However, there’s a better way, using the event.preventDefault() method. I had the need to [...]

jQuery Image Overlay 1.2

I’ve updated my image overlay plugin yet again, to version 1.2. Again, it was a fairly minor enhancement – I added the ability to turn off the animation via an option. The translucent image overlay effect is popping up all over the web nowadays, and I want to make sure that my plugin implementation offers [...]

jQuery Image Overlay Plugin 1.1

A quick note – I’ve updated my jQuery Image Overlay Plugin to version 1.1. This version adds support for pinning the overlay so it is always viewable (not just when you mouse over the image). There were no other changes, so you should be able to upgrade without worry.

Determining Geolocation on the Web

Here’s a GeoLocator example I put together that showcases two popular GeoLocation techniques – IP lookup and using the GeoLocation API – in order to both demonstrate the techniques as well as to show the issues with each.
In HTML, there are a few ways of determining the location of a user. Traditionally, this has always [...]

New Theme, Digging Into WordPress

I just recently changed to a new theme for my site. Since then, I’ve been doing my first real digging into the internals of how theming works and how to talk to the back end of WordPress. It’s been a suprisingly pleasant venture – all your content is easily accessible and the interface is clean. [...]

jQuery Image Overlay Plugin

I’ve created my first jQuery plugin this week – it’s an image overlay plugin (the static pic above doesn’t do the plugin justice, so click through to see it in action).
Creating a jQuery plugin isn’t that big a stretch for a competent JavaScript developer. There are quite a few tutorials out there where you can [...]