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.

@ javascript

@

You then have access to the user’s location with the "myLocation" variable and can take it from there…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, jQuery UI

In this tutorial we’ll build a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game as a fun and simple project to learn jQuery grep, queue/dequeue, delay and animation as well as jQuery UI draggable, droppable, effects and button.

View the jQuery Game

I grabbed the ninja turtle sprites and renamed them and organized them into folders…

In this tutorial we’ll build a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game as a fun and simple project to learn jQuery grep, queue/dequeue, delay and animation as well as jQuery UI draggable, droppable, effects and button.

View the jQuery Game

I grabbed the ninja turtle sprites and renamed them and organized them into folders. The animated sprite of april is off another site.

Download Just the Images

First, lets setup a couple global variables and put our “good guys” and “bad guys” information in an array of objects…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery

A fairly random trail of interesting jQuery bookmarks.

jqFancyTransitions slideshow – fancy effect

jQuery 1.4 API Cheat Sheet – nice cheat sheet

jQuery Grid Layouts – haven’t used this, but I think it is cool.

jQuery Hot Keys – might need to target key combos with JavaScript?

File Style Plugin  – for styling those pesky file upload elements

Flot Charts – pure JavaScript charting library that will work on iPhone – check out google’s charts too…

Category: Tips & Random Tags: HTML5, Future, 3D

After watching Jesse Schell’s presentation on the future of gaming:

I’ll summarize from memory in case you don’t have time to watch it:

• Farm Ville, Guitar Hero, Wii, Wii Fit.. etc all made TONS of money. They seem to hit the gaming industry out of nowhere.
• They have one thing in common – they bring gaming to the real world…

…

Category: Business & Management Tags: My Work, Business

Despite putting the last two years into building products and clientele, I am still living in a cold basement of a house that I don’t own. I am not giving up, though. Here, I will document the main struggles I’ve had in each step of building products on the web.

Planning

Nothing goes as planned. You can have a well thought-out and orchestrated plan, but it won’t happen that way unless you are copy-catting other people or have built something really similar in the past…

Category: Marc Grabanski's Work Tags: My Work

Since this website is dedicated to documenting my career, I figure I’d better take a look at the last 11 months which have been quite inspiring.

The company I started now has a strong team and we are ready to swing for the fence next year. We have gained 20+ clients, with 30+ projects which all have been delivered on time and on budget…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, Books

If you haven’t heard of or read jQuery Enlightenment, then you probably should go subscribe to more jQuery blogs, this one has been posted everywhere. Simply because this book is an excellent read with excellent examples, worth the $15 purchase. It has live links to code examples you might need down the road.

And no, I wasn’t paid to do this post…

Category: Linux & Server Admin Tags: Security, Linux

A friend of mine, elliot swan got hacked. One of his JavaScript files had been modified to contain some sort of advertisement. Here are a few things you can do to lock your server down, starting with simple tips and getting more advanced at the bottom.

1. Change your web hosting password.
2. Change your SSH / root login username (if possible) and password…

…

Category: Marc Grabanski's Work Tags: My Work, Business

Aside from my office turning into a complete disaster…

Here is an update on the status of my projects as of 10 months ago.

• Rent Update: launched public beta! We are now walking property managers through sign up for their free listings and gathering feedback. The product is about 2 years in development, but still in the user-testing stage…

Category: Business & Management Tags: Free Tools, Productivity, Management

It is not very often that I am blown away by software to an (tech)emotional level. Today I was blown away. I honestly believe Pivotal Tracker could change the way I view product development from now on.

It is like someone reaced inside my dreams and then made a tracking system based on it. I have even pitched this same type of idea to a business partnhers before: ticket items based on value-added to the business…

Category: Linux & Server Admin Tags: Media Temple, Ruby, Linux

Note to Regular Readers: I have landed a client that I’m doing front-end work for on Ruby on Rails, so I might start posting Rails stuff from time to time… BEWARE! =)

+ on  

After getting rails installed on mac and Rails through Mongrel on Media Temple (dv) and running through the getting started with rails guide I was having issues installing MySQL ruby gem…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: JavaScript

If you are creating a JavaScript library for people to use, you want to make sure that you aren’t overriding existing JavaScript events that your users may have already attached.

Existing Event

window.onclick = function(e) {
alert(‘existing event’);
}
Creating a New Event

If we want to preserve that existing event, we need to follow these steps:

1. Wrap the new event definition in a closure to capture the existing event…

Category: Usability & Testing Tags: Testing

After writing clean, cross-browser code and testing it in all browsers.. what if issues show up on others’ computers and not yours? Recently this happened to me and I was baffled.

Cross-Browser Testing

Upon testing my code in IE6+ through a virtual machine, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.. it all worked. Yet when I handed off the code to the client, they replied, "the submit button isn’t working"…

Category: PHP & CakePHP Tags: Email, PHP, CakePHP

When launching new websites and web applications, it is difficult to get on trusted email lists of Hotmail, Yahoo and Etc. Aside from having proper SPF records, a great way to avoid this sysadmin problem is to use Gmail / Google Apps to offload your domain’s email to their servers. By doing this, your domain gets an instant trust factor with receiving mail servers that a new server simply cannot do in a short period of time…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, jQuery UI

  VS

A new library has come out called, "jQuery Tools" that is packed with some visually appealing plugins built on top of jQuery. Here is their opening line to grab your interest:

Let’s face it: do you really need drag-and-drop, resizables, selectables or sortable tables in your web applications? Websites are not desktop applications…

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: Google Maps, JavaScript

Google announced version 3 of the google maps API.

Some things I noticed right away:

• no API key required! before you had to sign up for an API key, but now you can shed your API key woes (I know I had them) and not have to sign up for one again.
• mobile browser support (iphone and android)
• Because of mobile support, you now have to specifiy the sensor variable in your include of google maps
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps…

Category: Communication & Reading Tags: Twitter, Communication

"I’m shifting from RSS to the live-web [Twitter]" – Minnov8 podcast: episode 36

Another person on the podcast even quoted:

"The internet seems to be shifting to the live-web instead of blogging"

This quote fired me enough to write a blog post telling you that Twitter is nothing more than another form of communication, and no other form of communication is going away or diminishing…

Category: Business & Management Tags: Business

What I am about to share with you comes at a price. In the last few years I have shared many triumphs and positive things, but now I am going to pull from a chapter in my life that was dark to pull out lessons learned and expose the story about this company I worked for.

Early-mid 2006 was the worst 6 months of my professional life, but it didn’t start that way…

At the University of Minnesota’s web conference, MinneWebCon I gave a talk on, "jQuery Essentials" and it seemed well-received. I enjoyed giving the presentation and I particularly enjoyed it because I finally was able to present in my home state of Minnesota!

Enjoy the slides! Keep it real, y’all.

…

Brian, a freelancer on a mailing list I’m part of, has to make the leap to hiring his first employee. This is obviously a good time for him, but it also can be challenging because he now has another person to consider while doing his work:

"For anybody who has had an employee, any advice? Any things I should be concerned about? I’m a little nervous about it but all in all feeling more relief than anything…

There are many times I want to leverage jQuery’s strengths to create a custom Google Maps mashup. In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to get started using jQuery inside the Google Maps environment. I will assume nothing, and explain each piece in detail.

View Final Demo

If you are already familiar with Google Maps API, skip to step #5, or so.

Step #1: Get API key

First, grab yourself an API key for Google Maps, you will need this in the next step…

What I am about to share with you comes at a price. In the last few years I have shared many triumphs and positive things, but now I am now going to pull from a chapter in my life that was dark to pull out lessons learned and expose the story about this company I worked for.

Early-mid 2006 was the worst 6 months of my professional life, but it didn’t start that way.

How It All Started

The owner was excited, seemingly honest and downright cheerful and optimistic to work with me…

I took pyjax’s WYMEditor resizable plugin and turned it into something that works for me using jQuery UI 1.6.

To use this, include jQuery, jQuery UI core and resizable, WYMEditor, then this. In that order.

WYMeditor.editor.prototype.resizable = function(options) {
var wym = this;
// Define some default options
var default_options = {
start: function(e, ui) {
jQuery(wym…

A few people responded to the comment I made on Twitter about jQuery UI and Google Maps:

"Made a really cool jQuery UI thing on top of Google Maps. Thinking of how to make it into a screencast or tutorial."

by 1Marc on Twitter

"@1Marc mind taking a little video with jing to show what y ou are up to? "

by Thomaschaaf on Twitter

So I quick made this little screencast thing via jing (partly because I was curious what jing was):

For some reason, I’ve had such a hard time getting motivation to make a screencast about jQuery and Google Maps…

I was writing about my own startup companies, then found Ryan Carson’s post on building his web applications.

Here is the part of the post I found particularly interesting, the contract:

Elliott [the developer] will receive 10% of monthly revenues, after the expenses listed above. If he launches the site on time (3pm April 20th), this will increase to 15% (hat tip to Natasha on that idea)…

2008 was a year of embarking on a journey towards personal freedoms in my career, which although was scary at times, paid off in spades.

Attained Freedoms

The following freedoms are available to me, that I didn’t have at the beginning of this year:

• work from home remotely
• hire people I trust
• create my own applications
• work as much or little as I desire and still get paid for it (as a contractor)
• take time out to eat, read and pray (during the work day)
• spend more time doing things outside of normal work like go to conferences, spend time with my girlfriend and go on vacations

Assets VS Liabilities

Attaining these freedoms became incredibly important to me late 2007 when I realized I was building someone else’s assets…

"Should I use Dreamweaver to code websites?" my short answer is, no – you should learn to use an editor that was made with coders as the main focus.

"But doesn’t Dreamweaver have a code editor build into it?"

Yes, Dreamweaver contains a code editor. But my answer to why a coder should not use it goes back to the original intent of the application. The intent of Dreamweaver was to give people who don’t know how to code websites the power to build websites…