From the category archives:

Tutorial

Choose better passwords

A friend of mine recently fell victim to the Facebook 419 scam (basically someone logs into your Facebook account and asks your friends for money).
There are lots of ways bad things can happen to your computer and your online accounts, but if you use weak passwords, you’re increasing the risk that something bad will eventually [...]

Read the full article → September 29, 2009

Poor programmer’s website monitor

If you manage your own web site, it’s critical to know when there are problems, and hopefully you’ll know before your users do. There are several enterprise-grade server monitors and website monitors available ranging from free to expensive, but if you need something right now that’s simple and free, you might consider the solution I [...]

Read the full article → May 26, 2009

jQuery date chooser

Providing a simple, consistent method for allowing your end-users to enter a date in a form is another great reason to use jQuery and jQuery UI. There have been many date selection tools created — you may have invented one yourself — but few are as great as the jQuery UI datepicker.
As with all things [...]

Read the full article → May 12, 2009

Using Google docs as a data store

Have you ever wished you had a web-accessible data store for a project but you either can’t or prefer not to create a database? Recently while developing a Google gadget, I ran into just that scenario. The gadget needs to display some mostly read only data. By mostly, I mean that the data needs to [...]

Read the full article → May 6, 2009

Building an Ajax content proxy in PHP

Last week I wanted to write an article about using Google docs as a data store for use in Javascript, but in order to do so, I first need to provide a basic article about content proxies.
For security reasons, Ajax requests are only allowed to domains from which the code originates. For example, if your [...]

Read the full article → May 5, 2009

jQuery tabs

I’ve finally had a chance to implement a solution with jQuery tabs and I was very pleased with the simplicity of creating a very simple tabbed interface. I’ve used several tab solutions before the jQuery UI solution, and I definitely prefer the jQuery solution (yet again).
To set up a basic tabbed layout, start with an [...]

Read the full article → April 30, 2009

jQuery autocomplete

Autocompletion of web-based forms has become so common that it has reached the point of being an expectation. Fortunately (again), there is a jQuery solution that makes this a simple addition to any form.
The first step is to download the jQuery Autocomplete plugin and check out the documentation. Make sure that you include the script [...]

Read the full article → April 28, 2009

jQuery parent(s)

I was recently working on an unordered list in which each item is displayed with a link that does two things: first, the metadata for the item is stored in a database via Ajax; second, the item is removed from the on-screen list so it can’t be chosen again.
For example, you might display a list [...]

Read the full article → April 27, 2009

jQuery solution: selected radio button value

The radio button element in an HTML form can be awkward to manage in Javascript. For example, assume the following form:

[-]?View Code HTML<form id="radio_form">
<fieldset>
<label><input type="radio" name="color" value="red" checked="checked" />Red</label><br />
<label><input type="radio" name="color" value="yellow" />Yellow</label><br />
<label><input type="radio" name="color" [...]

Read the full article → April 20, 2009

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