The jQuery UI 1.8 release brings along the new autocomplete widget. An autocomplete adds a list of suggestions to an input field, displayed and filtered while the user is typing. This could be attached to a search field, suggesting either search terms or just matching results for faster navigation. But what if there is a fixed list of options, usually implemented as a standard HTML select element, where the ability to filter would help users find the right value way faster?

That’s a “combobox…

A while back I posted about the opportunity most retailers miss out on – optimizing their own websites for their store names plus “free shipping.”

Related searches in Google indicate the suggestions are highly searched, and therefore valuable to optimize for.

Add to free shipping searches for “promo code(s),” “voucher code(s),” “coupon code(s),” “discount code(s)” et cetera…

Information graphics (or infographics) are used to display information in ways that are more creative than plain old text. These days, they surround us in the media, published works, road signs and manuals. Lately, the Internet has been flooded with infographics on various topics, ranging from science and technology to society and culture. In this article, we’ll look at the process of designing an infographic about programming…

I’ve reviewed Scribe SEO and mentioned it as a tool I like to use a few times here. If you’ve been thinking of using it but where concerned about the price, theres a promotional offer ending today.If you use the code PROMO27 when you checkout you can get the $97 level for only $27, but it ends June 4th 2010. If you’re still unsure they offer a new starter plan for only $17 a month you can only put it on one website a month and run it 15 times, but it’s a great way to test it out IMHO…

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

…

I was reading my backlog of feeds just now, and came across a couple of updated WordPress SEO plugins aimed at improving your site’s SEO. Some people are just plain ^%$#*& stupid, I’m sorry to say.

Let me show you what got me so wound up:

#1 Canonical Link Plugin

This Canonical Link plugin consists of the following code:

function canonicalink() { $request_uri = parse_url($_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’],PHP_URL_PATH); echo “<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$request_uri}” />”;
}
 
add_action(’wp_head’,'canonicalink’,1,1);

If you know PHP, you can see what it does: it parses the current URL, strips out URL variables (if you’ve got any) and displays the current URL as the canonical link element…

In search volume alone, YouTube is the #2 search engine behind Google itself.  Yet even with its gigantic size, it is easy for YouTube to get passed up by online advertisers.  Many advertisers ignore the opportunity due to the convoluted process required to explicitly target YouTube with ads.  This means there is less competition for ad space on YouTube and great rewards for those who can crack the code…

In search volume alone, YouTube is the #2 search engine behind Google itself.  Yet even with its gigantic size, it is easy for YouTube to get passed up by online advertisers.  Many advertisers ignore the opportunity due to the convoluted process required to explicitly target YouTube with ads.  This means there is less competition for ad space on YouTube and great rewards for those who can crack the code…

If you have ever done an A/B testing on your website or landing page, you would know how exciting is the prospect of finding out which variation is going to perform best. It is almost like a football game where you can’t tell until the end which team is going to win. But that excitement soon cools off once you actually get to create and implement an A/B test: creating different pages, fiddling with HTML code, integrating JavaScript page tags…

Modern Web-building technologies allow designers to realize their most daring and creative ideas. Enhanced interactivity and a remarkable visual appearance can be achieved by means of such tools as Flash, JavaScript and Papervision3D, to name just a few. These strengths usually impress and entertain visitors and thus are often used for conceptual artistic presentations and promotional campaigns…

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…

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…

Bookmarklets are small JavaScript-powered applications in link form. Often “one-click” tools and functions, they’re typically used to extend the functionality of the browser and to interact with Web services. They can do things like post to your WordPress or Tumblr blog, submit any selected text to Google Search, or modify a current page’s CSS… and many other things!

Because they run on JavaScript (a client-side programming language), bookmarklets (sometimes called “favelets”) are supported by all major browsers on all platforms, without any additional plug-ins or software needed…

I’ve been working on an ajax site that needs to pass parameters elegantly via the hash tag. While working, I realized that there is usability value to a standardized URL (not to mention SEO value, if Google ever indexes such javascript based pages). In any event, I created this function to sort my hash arrays, and figured you might find it useful too:

function sortObj(arr){
// Setup Arrays
var sortedKeys = new Array();
var sortedObj = {};

// Separate keys and sort them
for (var i in arr){
sortedKeys…

When working out your site search requirements for your ecommerce system, do you know what to look for in a site search tool?

O’Reilly Media has granted Get Elastic permission to reprint this excerpt of Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender’s Search Patterns. The following is a checklist of things you discuss with vendors when evaluating a site search solution:

System architecture
Formal description of the hardware and software components, including crawlers, indexers, data models, and query parsers…

This post is dedicated to Architecture Photography. Our surrounding is full of many beautiful things: traditional or fashionable, architectural photography can be as exciting as it is gratifying. In this kind of photography, a photographer usually experiments with various angles, settings, timing and effects to achieve the most interesting shot of buildings…

I suspect many of my readers have written at least one jQuery Plugin / Script. In this post, I’d like to show you how to get the most out of that script by also releasing it as a jQuery Bookmarklet. Below, you’ll find two examples of utilities that are ripe for bookmarkleting, as well as a prepared jQuery Bookmarklet file that you can easily modify for the purpose.

Note: Even if you haven’t written a jQuery plugin before, you’ll find bookmarkleting someone else’s plugin as easy as using it on a site…

(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)For those not attending Google I/O, remember to tune in to http://youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers on Wednesday, May 19 and Thursday, May 20, to watch the Google I/O keynote presentations live.Keynote times:Wednesday, May 19, 9:00am – 10:30am PDTThursday, May 20, 8:30am – 10:00am PDTTo stay up to date on I/O news, follow us on Twitter or Buzz — and to go one level deeper on I/O session content, live wave with us…

Mosque is a Holy place for Muslims. It refers to its Arabic name – Masjid. A Mosque is a place for worship for all the followers of Islam. Mosques all around the world are well known for the general importance to Muslims as well as for Islamic architecture and representation of Islamic culture. Although Mosque is the place where all the Muslims of the community come together and have their prayers, Mosque can also be the place of beautiful architecture that is famous all around the world…

For a fair few numbers of years Drupal has had the reputation of being a difficult CMS to learn. Any web developer will tell you that. It is a fair reputation, but this does take a lot of the gloss and prestige away from what it deserves.

Whereas once you manage to get beyond the initial tricky learning curve, everything falls into place and is relatively straight forward, and what you are left with is one powerful beast of an engine that can handle anything you throw at it…

Recently we released an open-source script called EnhanceJS that lets you apply progressive enhancement to your projects in a practical way: it tests a browser’s capabilities before loading CSS or JavaScript enhancements onto a page, and ensures that it receives a usable experience based on those capabilities.

Though IE versions 6 through 8 pass EnhanceJS’s capabilities tests and render most enhancements correctly, they sometimes render CSS or JavaScript in quirky ways…

Recently we released an open-source script called EnhanceJS that lets you apply progressive enhancement to your projects in a practical way: it tests a browser’s capabilities before loading CSS or JavaScript enhancements onto a page, and ensures that it receives a usable experience based on those capabilities.

Though IE versions 6 through 8 pass EnhanceJS’s capabilities tests and render most enhancements correctly, they sometimes render CSS or JavaScript in quirky ways…

Yaknow, I’ve been using Firebug for quite some time, but I haven’t seen many places mention using it as a bookmarklet. Having gotten partway through programming my own makeshift javascript bookmarklet debugger, I was thrilled to find out Firebug Lite can be bookmarkletized too! Here’s the link – right click and add it to your bookmarks to try it out:

Note: due to WordPress limitations in presenting bookmarklets as links, the above link is actually in an iframe…

There is little doubt that WordPress is one of the most popular blogging and content management platforms out there today. This is not an article about WordPress, though, but rather a more general musing on one of its thought-provoking taglines: “Code Is Poetry.”

That’s an interesting metaphor. Recently, I’ve written about the different languages used by designers and developers, and also about the relationship between these coding languages and proper human language (specifically, English)…

GetList.org Local University in Minneapolis is coming up on May 13th at the Westin Edina Galleria and there will be an AM and one PM session. As always the Twin Cities event will be focused on providing the small business person with an overview of marketing their business on the web.

The regular cost is $129 but the discount of $40 is still available (use discount code MB). To register visit our Twin Cities page…

We often talk about how to make our websites more usable, whether it’s tweaking the HTML structure of pages to benefit the user’s process or figuring out how best to display a message via CSS. But we never bring this thought process into our jQuery-based (and other JavaScript-based) elements. How can we enhance the user experience and usability of our jQuery events?

Below, we’ll briefly discuss ways to look at the code and the result of our interactive designs and, thus, improve their usability…

Event delegation in JavaScript is the concept of using a single event listener to manage all of the mouse and keyboard events on a given page thus improving performance.

Often web developers will assign an event listener to each element that is associated with some effect or bit of AJAX. For example, perhaps I have three buttons on a page each of which will initiate a specific and unique animation when a user clicks…