Blog
Add Your Twitter Feed using JavaScript
Here is a method to show your Twitter posts on your own web site using jQuery, JSON, and the Twitter API.
Centerpiece Slideshow With jQuery
My Showcase Slideshow With MooTools was pretty popular but it's over two years old. I've recreated the functionality of the script (hopefully improving it slightly) using jQuery.
Time Visualizations: MooTools Scrubber
Sometimes static data is not sufficient to portray information changes over time. For example, you need to show population growth in the United States. You could just have four separate images depicting concentrations from sequential decades. A more interactive approach, would be to use a slider to toggle between the separate graphics. In audio and video editing, this slider is called a scrub bar. Here's how to set one up using a simple MooTools 1.2 script that I call The Scrubber.
Tabs in MooTools 1.2
MooTools 1.2 has been in the wild for a number of months now. My Accessible Ajax Tabs demo has been rewritten for 1.2.
Web Design Trends for 2008
Nick La of Web Designer Wall posted a list of popular web design trends for 2008. Although trends certainly overlap from year to year, and some take years to disappear, here's my list of design concepts I think typify the look of 2008.
The Markup Informs The Design
37signals recently talked about why they skip Photoshop mock-ups when designing a site. Although this seems to spit in the eye of the established method, I couldn't agree more. This is a philosophical concept, more about the nature of the web than the process of building it. But there are many reasons to cut right to the HTML, the least of which being: you shouldn't put the cart before the horse.
Accessible Ajax Tabs With MooTools
Ajax tabs (JavaScript tabs that only load tab content on request) have a couple problems:
- Can't be bookmarked.
- Search engines can't index the tab content.
- Inaccessible for users with JavaScript turned off.
They are, in many ways, frames for the web 2.0 generation. But they don't have to be. In this tutorial, I'll demonstrate how to make search-engine-friendly, handicap-accessible Ajax tabs using MooTools and PHP.
Parsing RSS Feeds With PHP
The beauty of RSS is that it's meant to be consumed. Unlike the various ethical and legal implications of screen-scraping, RSS aggregation is not only fair game but is its intended method of propagation. Here is an aggregation function that works best for me.