Unemployed Developer

Doing a little bit of self promotion here, in hopes of getting some notice for my first jQuery plugin.

I decided to create a Google Maps plugin and carry over many of the different features that the Google Maps API offers in jQuery form. The goal of this plugin was to make a quick and easy way for someone to implement a Google Map on their page with minimal to intermediate experience.

This plugin has many cool features, well at least my mom says they are cool! I’ve given the ability to allow a user to put options on the map from single to multiple markers, polyline, panning, depth, latitude, longitude and more. You can see some working examples at my web development portfolio.
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I really should keep up on these link roundups, but you know…

How to Get Hired at a Startup

This is a real interesting post for those looking at getting hired at a startup. Most startups I know are looking for the relationship over the merits of a potential employee. This blog posts highlights some useful tips to help you show the company that you will fit in. If some of these tips don’t apply to you, then chances are low you will get hired. Read More

10 Performance Tips to Speed Up PHP

I like to read about these performance tips even though I know and do my best to practice them in my code. I think it’s important to always ensure your code not only works but works efficiently.. Read More

8 Very Useful jQuery forms

We all like lists don’t we? Well this site has a great but small list of useful jQuery form plugins. jQuery is my favorite JavaScript library and I don’t hesitate to use it where necessary. Some of these plugins are great to use in web forms. it can give your forms and added edge in professionalism, in my opinion. (beware of users who turn JavaScript off!!)… Read More

23 Pure CSS Effects/Solutions to Make JavaScript Angry!

I can’t just leave well enough alone can I? The last link I’m promoting JavaScript, and now I’m promoting CSS solutions to make JavaScript Angry! This is another nice long list of effects that can be achieved in CSS and/or JavaScript. some of these would be better suited as some users still browse the web with JavaScript off… Read More

If you haven’t heard of sIFR, it is Scalable Inman Flash Replacement which allows you to utilize flash, CSS and JavaScript to create custom typography on your web page. The font-family class in CSS can only load so many fonts as it will only load the fonts that the browser supports. sIFR allows us the option to use our own fonts and harness the SEO power of our text as we don’t have to rely on having images or flash files to display any custom text.

I’d like to look at a feature that more Flash developers would know about. I came across this issue when I was trying to find a solution to having drop shadows in my font, so my initial thought was to use the drop-shadow CSS class, but I didn’t like the lack of browser support for it, so that solution was out. sIFR seemed like the next reasonable solution to try. Since I prefer to use the jQuery library with any JavaScript that I use, I used the jQuery sIFR plugin. Read more »

I just wanted to write a simple and quick tutorial taking our initial Object Oriented JavaScript postings(Object-Oriented JavaScript – Part II (encapsulation) &
Object-Oriented JavaScript – Part I (Objects)) and expand on them using jQuery.

If you recall we had a Person object and a getName method inside of it. How would we do this in jQuery?

To run jQuery we need to get the latest library file from their website. Or you can connect to the library file on their code repository. But keep in mind if the code repository goes down while your site is up, your JavaScript will become broken. Best practices would be to download the latest library and host it on your server with the rest of your code. For these examples we will explain using the code repository link. Read more »

To carry on our tutorial on object oriented JavaScript, as our next step will be on encapsulation.

What is encapsulation? Gary Booch defined encapsulation as “the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation.” Sounds smart eh?

So let’s dummy it down for this example. I’m sure you noticed, and I hope you asked yourself, in our previous examples, what if someone used a method that was being used with one object with another, well that methods scope would be over written by the new one. To ensure that each object can have it’s own method, we would have to write the method in the scope of the object. Did you “whuh?” there again? Maybe a code example will help. Read more »

OOP is a style of programming that allows you to define or manipulate your data as objects with attributes and methods applied to those objects. These objects can include features such as polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, modularity and more. If you’ve never used object-oriented-programming(oop), this post does assume some knowledge of OOP methodologies, hopefully you can follow along.

Object-Oriented JavaScript is an interesting topic, since Javascript can be easily written and run in procedural form. OOP is intended to help maintain software quality and making use of reusable attributes and methods. JavaScript isn’t really an Object-Oriented language by default, but it is object based so we can utilize enough of the concepts to make our scripts work.
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