It’s been a fun ride.

In three and a half years, I went from a programmer with very little writing skills (just trying to not forget things I learned) to really being listened to by a wide range of people.

Traffic, Oh! So Much Traffic

Millions of people. I can’t imagine how many football stadiums that would fill up! Sure, all I was doing was pushing the knowledge needle forward for people through open source code, but it really sunk deep into my heart what I was doing…

As our interfaces get more complex, JavaScript testing is becoming more critical. With browser testing, you should get as close to native events as you can. Jörn Zaefferer recommended I check out jQuery Simulate. In my case I just needed a pure JavaScript way to simulate browser click events at a given location, so I ripped out the jQuery dependance and created a wrapper just around the mouse events…

The deeper I get into CouchDB, the more I love it. I empathize with the thread on Quora about why isn’t couchDB more popular? started by someone who was blown away like I was when I started using CouchDB.

Quick FYI: this article is a high-level overview of CouchDB features, not a tutorial.

Ok, so what makes me so excited about CouchDB?! CouchDB is a NoSQL, schema-free JSON document storage where JavaScript can access the database directly via HTTP with no middleware required! Let me say that again…

JavaScript can access the database directly…

Society is moving at an unprecedented pace. A year ago I didn’t have the word “Android” in my vocabulary but now I use an Android phone every day. Entrepreneurs of yesterday have to wake up to this new world and realize that the rules have changed. Entrepreneurs suddenly, “cannot find good talent”. Meanwhile, hackers don’t need idea people when they are the idea people…

I wrote this article looking out the window of the cheap bedroom I’m renting, while thinking about how I planned to dump significant amount of my business’s profits into creating a conference that is free for everyone. It turned into a whopping success in terms of everyone getting great education and having a good time. If you are curious what I am talking about read coverage of the event…

Increasingly people think I’m rich so this is the first in a series of articles that I’ve drafted to break down my concept of value and wealth to open up a path of discovering what real "rich"ness really is. Even though I am not rich financially (though they think I am), people I’ve talked to who are making millions wonder just how I am able to make moves that are too risky for even them to take…

I wanted to take a moment to share my views on paid versus free education as this has been a topic on my heart for a long time…education is in the core of things I think about on a daily basis.

Halting Open Source for Education

You could go as far to say I halted writing open source for the sake of learning to teach (not in a classroom sense, but the broader sense of the term)…

The most reliable way I know how to improve the future is to learn from the past. If you don’t like your past, change your ways. If you do like elements of the past, learn from them and do more.

First, I’m going to do a recap of the past. Then I’ll share about what happened this year.

Foreword: Informational Rags to Riches

I grew up in and still live in Minnesota…

Last week I started engineering a new datepicker from the ground up I’m calling jQuery UI Datepicker Lite (more info on github). Out of my efforts came a new plugin I’m calling jQuery Date. Refer to the date.js file in the github repo.

The date plugin is a very lightweight plugin that provides a fairly simple API for the things I typically need to do with dates and will need for the new datepicker…

After reading Tim Berners-Lee’s writings on how Facebook threatens the future of the web it occurred to me just how in the reverse argument is also true, projects like WordPress actually saved the web up until now.

WordPress Saves Intellectual Property of Millions

Millions of websites are self-hosted with WordPress. Along with that hundreds of millions of articles, content and words have been produced on these self-hosted domains on an open source code base…

It has been almost three months since I first released my Prerelease of The jQuery Course. I feel I owe it to everyone to talk about the development of the course. Happily all the news is good news!

Signing on Karl Swedberg as Editor

Over the next month, I will be finishing the course with Karl Swedberg as editor. He is the author of the Learning jQuery Book and also the creator of the Learning jQuery blog…

One area a lot of us developers like to worry about is personal productivity tools. When I think about all the time I’ve wasted on finding out the best tools for the job, I wonder.. why am I wasting all this time? The reason is because I’ve lost site of, “The Mission”.

The Key to Productivity, “The Mission”

The first, biggest key to productivity is to define your underlying philosophy of why you do what you do…

This article is the all-encompassing thought train of me wrestling with the overarching concept of organizing and sharing knowledge online. I’m building an application that deals with these very concepts, so consider this market research that you get to listen to and take part in via the comments.

What do we organize and share online?

There are a few things that a person shares online…

Note: Normally I write solutions to problems, but this a problem I have no solution for. By explaining it I believe it will still be educational and therefore worth publishing.

The project I’m working on at the moment is in Groovy. In order to set JSON on page load, you have to escape either single quotes or double quotes.

var myJSON = ‘this is the cat\’s first day in Marc\’s house’; // JavaScript string

With groovy, you can cast something as JSON and set it to the view pretty easily…

Every good developer has their own independent visions, but even when visions line up developers chose to build independently instead of together. College students don’t seem to have this problem, but anyone seasoned in their career will only work for money or so it seems. The risk is gone, the emotion, the drive, the opportunism to create something new that drives new businesses goes away…

A very fundamental part of JavaScript is the if statement. One thing that gets people all up-tight is using ternary operators and not using curly brackets in your JavaScript. Some argue that it isn’t readable. In this article I’ll show you what practices I use and hopefully you can give me your thoughts.

Normal if statements

Nothing special here, just a normal if statement.

foo = "bar";
if ( foo == "bar" ) {
foo = "something";
} else {
foo = "somethingElse";
}

If statements can be written without curly brackets

foo = "bar";
if ( foo == "bar")
foo = "something";
else
foo = "somethingElse";

What people don’t like about this is if you need to do another action inside the if statement, then you have to manually go back and wrap it in curly brackets…

Before jQuery 1.4, you had to specify the dataType in all of the types of ajax requests.

$.get(url, data, function, "html/json/xml..");
$.post(url, data, function, "html/json/xml..");
$.ajax({
…
dataType: "html/json/xml.."
});

Now, you can have the server respond with the mime type like application/json and jQuery will automatically switch the dataType for you! This makes more sense because the server is the one sending the response, jQuery is only handling it…

jQuery Essentials on Slideshare – View more presentations from Marc Grabanski

Want to download the presentation? PDF of jQuery Essentials

…

It can be a pain to create HTML elements in JavaScript. In this article I will outline a few ways I deal with HTML. First, we’ll look at whether to use an HTML string or a jQuery object, then look at my little HTML string builder utility and finally get some links to templating libraries for building more complex HTML.

HTML String, or jQuery Object?

The first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not it makes sense to build out HTML as jQuery objects, or if you require the speed of building strings…

When I started learning Ruby, managing gems was a huge problem to the point I would make fun of it. Now I use RVM which helps you install multiple versions of ruby on one computer. Not only does it do that, but it makes gem management a breeze as well! Beyond RVM, Rails 3 provides us with bundler, which allows you to install gems based on a list of dependancies automatically. Very slick…

BBQ: Back Button & Query Library

Source: http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

Leverages the HTML5 hashchange event to allow simple, yet powerful bookmarkable #hash history. In addition, jQuery BBQ provides a full .deparam() method, along with both hash state management, and fragment / query string parse and merge utility methods.

ColorBox: Lightbox

Source: http://colorpowered…

Marc Grabanski

Marc Grabanski is a professional web developer out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He currently runs a consulting company and is partnered with local businesses to create startup companies.

Technical Abilities

Marc’s technical skills are focused towards user interface development (JavaScript / CSS / HTML), but also spans across a wide range of technologies and skill-sets. He runs a blog titled, “Jack of All Trades Web Development” and is currently focusing on sharpening his skills with web application development…

Ajax Messages

Javascript/Ajax, PHP, MySQL, CSS, XHTML
Ajax Messages is a demonstration of the power of Ajax.

Clean Calendar

Javascript, CSS, XHTML
Clean Calendar is a DHTML date picker with very clean code.

Fisheye Menu

Javascript, CSS, XHTML
Fisheye Menu is inspired by the MacOS doc.

Clean Form Validation

…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, jQuery UI

During the prerelease of The jQuery Course, you’ll get early access to 61 minutes of video training for $25. You will also receive the final course content when it’s ready for no extra charge.

Prerelease of The jQuery Course

Video outline

• Introduction [1:44]
• Examples of jQuery [1:44 - 3:56]
• Web Fundamentals, Brief intro to HTML, CSS and JavaScript [4:26 - 7:57]
• Setup – Web Browser, Firebug, Code Editor [7:57 - 9:49]
• Why jQuery Exists [9:49 - 12:13]
• Using jQuery [12:13 - 15:45]
• About Google Hosted jQuery [15:45 - 17:14]
• Methods with Many Uses and Chaining [18:52 - 19:57]
• Dollar Function [19:57 - 23:58]
• Using jQuery with Other Libraries [23:58 - 26:16]
• Dive Into Selectors [26:16 - 36:04]
• Attributes [36:05 - 51:18]
• Animation and Effects [51:19 - 61:34]

Setting out to create "The jQuery Course"

Teaching has been huge a passion of mine…

During the prerelease of The jQuery Course, you’ll get early access to 61 minutes of video training for $25. You will also receive the final course content when it’s ready for no extra charge.

Prerelease of The jQuery Course

“I bought this video series the moment it has been released because ive loved your previous tutorials on your blog. From the perspective of someone who has only ever lightly used javascript / jQuery its been great so far and i would highly recommend it…

Category: Communication & Reading Tags:

Being a great web developer is not something you just "fall" into. It takes time, perseverance and an ability to sift through information like crazy to find out exactly what you want to do it and what the best way to do it is. Software always changes, so being great in a sea of changes is about creating the changes and improving yourself, first…

Being a great web developer is not something you just "fall" into. It takes time, perseverance and an ability to sift through information like crazy to find out exactly what you want to do it and what the best way to do it is. Software always changes, so being great in a sea of changes is about creating the changes and improving yourself, first.

We web developers learned from each other how to be web developers…

Category: Business & Management Tags: Business

Introspection and reflection on the last few years of being a "balls to the wall" entrepreneur, I’ve studied and found a few commonalities of successful people and the ability to accumulate wealth. Of course, I’m generalizing the word "success" here.

• Successful employees and entrepreneurs do what they love doing, or at the very least, something they feel makes an impact and difference in the world around them…

Introspection and reflection on the last few years of being a “balls to the wall” entrepreneur, I’ve studied and found a few commonalities of successful people and the ability to accumulate wealth. Of course, I’m generalizing the word “success” here.

Successful employees and entrepreneurs do what they love doing, or at the very least, something they feel makes an impact and difference in the world around them…

Category: Tips & Random Tags: HTML5

Google Ajax API does location lookup, so it makes it a great fallback for the native HTML5 Gelocation API. Of course, the fallback will never get near the same accuracy as GPS lookup, because it does a lookup on your ISP, but it is at least able to get you in the ballpark as a fallback.

Include Google AJAX API with your api key and then go ahead and use this code…