I spent a good bit of time on Google and the WordPress Codex trying to figure out the best way to customize comments to use Ajax for posting. I finally decided to write my own plugin to solve the issue, since there are a lot of ideas but no real concise nor comprehensive solutions that worked across the board. Additionally, I wanted to offer the capability of using a custom version of the built-in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) to users for comment modification as well. If you have some time to check it out and leave me some feedback, I would appreciate the input!

If you use Google Voice, you may be familiar with the option of creating widgets that you can place on your website which allow people to enter their phone number and request to be connected to your Google Voice number. There are several benefits to this type of behavior, but the best of these is that you can offer people the opportunity to call you without ever publicly displaying your phone number. What’s more, each new widget creates a unique buttonId associated with it that allows you to record a custom voicemail response for users of that widget.

Of course, the downside to use of the widget system is that it is not customizable at all, and it is only available in the form of a rather large Flash button to place on your site. After some digging and research, I finally figured out how to post requests to your unique buttonId via standard HTML forms. Taking this to the next level (and much more usable, I might add) lets us create a manual Ajax handler that will make our request to connect the user without ever leaving our page.
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As with any good solution, there needs to be a valid problem you’re trying to solve. In this case, I ran into a challenge at work and wanted to share the concepts of what I needed to accomplish in case anyone else has run into similar troubles.

I was assigned the task of integrating a new UI with a preexisting backend API, which is really not that big of a deal in and of itself. However, as I wanted to use BackboneJS as our client MVC framework and the API was by no means RESTful nor consistent, I quickly became aware that I would need to manually override the sync() method of nearly every one of my models in order to have things function properly. Again, in and of itself, this is not a problem, but working in an environment where maintenance and change are the rule, I wanted to figure out a way to extract the customization in such a way as to be extremely easy to manage.
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If you have used any JavaScript libraries before, you are most likely quite familiar with the concept of binding functions to specific events within an object, but have you ever considered creating your own custom events for your JavaScript classes to allow users even more flexibility in implementing your code? Binding listeners to user events (such as click or mouseover) is a necessity for robust coding, but what happens when I want to allow developers to execute a specific bit of logic only when my library element has been rendered to the page? I need to build my code in such a way as to give “hooks” to the coder in the form of events for which they can listen.
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I have recently begun to study a couple different ideas to ease the pain of more complex animations using the HTML5 canvas element. Primarily, I have been focusing on layering – stacking individual transparent canvas elements – to achieve a robust effect and help manage individual objects without having to redraw the entire pane with every refresh. In the orbit example above, the center sphere and background are drawn statically on the bottommost layer, while the animation of the satellites is calculated and drawn on a second layer. By clicking on the demo, you can toggle the visibility of the animation layer. If you cannot see the animation at all, you may want to consider picking up a real web browser: Firefox or Chrome are always good options.
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I have finally found a few spare minutes to refactor the Google Code Project I started for my jQuery plugin last year. While I still am far from where I want to be with it, I have managed to set the plugin into a fully OOP codebase and add in events and the capability for custom handlers on those events. My hope is that people will now be able to find a bit more usability to the slideshow, since it is fully customizable. Feel free to swing by my Google Code page and let me know thoughts or ideas on ways to improve the slideshow as it evolves.

So, many of you have sent me emails or asked me in person about how, exactly, to get started playing with the Flex SDK without having to pour any money into unnecessary resources or IDEs. First, let me say that purchasing and using Flex Builder will be one of the best investments you can make in your Flex development learning, but yes, you can indeed download the SDK free of charge and manually compile AS3 and AIR applications. This will be a very simple post dealing with just how this can be done. While there are many, many, many details we could approach, I want to tackle this issue in its simplest form and hopefully get people on the ground running within minutes of reading this post. Please note that this will be written for Windows users, though I highly recommend people set up a Linux environment and play with the command line tools there as well, if possible.
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Something has been bothering me for some time, and I finally took the time to resolve the issue once and for all – relatively speaking. As mentioned in my previous post, I have had opportunity to work with multiple different JavaScript libraries, and I often find myself running behind on the newest bug fixes for a given module. Many of the library development teams offer a nightly build available to checkout via SVN or Git (usually by way of GitHub), and I devised a way to automatically update my shared repositories among all the domains on my server. While not rocket science, nor an entirely new idea to most of you, it is quite helpful to me, and I thought I’d share my method here.

There are actually four steps involved with this update, so I apologize in advance if this gets too long.

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I have been working on some ideas for a TD game that would be both entertaining and original, and I feel that – with the help of a couple friends’ input – I’m on the way to something worth developing. Since I have already put together much of the “guts” for a TD game, I am hoping that I will be able to quickly put together a prototype in my free time. Ideally, once I have a prototype together, I will be able to find a sponsor to pay for development, and I would then be able to focus some solid time on the project, but that is a bit optimistic at this point, since we are still in the baby conceptual stage.

Without giving too much away on my idea, I’m going to try to cover some concepts and specific ideas that I have had to resolve in order to visualize different portions of the interface and interactions. The first thing I realized was, to fully succeed with the idea I want to implement, I would have to be able to support fairly large maps (in some remote cases, massive may be a better term). Having been a long time RTS (Real Time Strategy) player, I decided to take some cues from them and implement a similar map-handling system. Surprisingly, once things started falling into place, it was quite easy to tweak and get working to a satisfactory level.
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A while ago, I wrote a jQuery based slideshow that I shared with some friends, and I ended up getting a pretty good response to it – enough to merit making a full plugin with it. Here is the initial launch of the plugin and project, and I’d love to get any feedback pertaining to usability and additional features.

The intent is to remain very lightweight but flexible, and so far, that seems to be met. Following, you will find links to my Google Code project page as well as a sample script that demos the working slideshow. For any additional questions, please feel free to contact me.

Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/gw-slideshow/
Demo: http://code.guahanweb.com/jquery/demos/gwSlideshow.html

Enjoy!