Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Zen Coding – HTML Shorthand

In one of the greatest discoveries of my web development career, I stumbled upon the Zen Coding Project the other day. This is an absolutely amazing project that allows for building robust and — more importantly — valid HTML markup with a fraction of the keystrokes. What’s more, this new method of writing the code [...]

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WordPress Widgets and Flickr RESTful APIs

I have done some significant WordPress modifications for friends in the past, be it basic theme manipulations or custom hacking of plugins, but I decided that I wanted to write my own widget to help tie my Flickr account into my blog. I did some searching on the currently hosted WordPress plugin site, and while [...]

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Line Movement and Interaction in AS3

For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to get lines to “move” in AS3. By this, I don’t mean simple rotation and skewing of an existing line, but actually changing the line structure: length, thickness, etc. The challenge first became noteworthy when I was working on my Tower [...]

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Particle Generation and Management Study

Over the past week, I have had opportunity to play with some ideas for particle generation that have been floating around in my mind for a while. Why particles? Well, while single object animations are great, there is a certain level of realism to movement in everything from explosions and fireworks to dust and debris [...]

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Adding Links to a Dynamic Flash AS3 Slideshow

Those of you who may have followed my previous Flash AS3 Slideshow post may have noted that it was rather limiting in function. While there are sometimes valid uses for a slideshow to statically transition between images (whether or not those images are dynamically loaded), there are typically much more useful things we can do [...]

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How to Manually Trigger Events in JavaScript

Occasionally, I find need to be able to manually trigger a predefined JavaScript event from within the context of a web application. Those of you who didn’t understand that first statement may want to stop reading now or risk suffering from extreme boredom, but those who actually have encountered the same challenge in coding, please [...]

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jQuery Slideshow Plugin Update

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 [...]

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Dynamic XML Slideshow in AS3

Over the past year or so, I have been responsible for developing and maintaining a JavaScript Slideshow component for our internal CMS. With the similarities between JavaScript and Actionscript, I have wanted to implement this slideshow in a manner consistent with the flexibility and usage of the JavaScript version. The biggest difference is that the [...]

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JavaScript Library Nightly Builds, SymLinks and Auto-Updates

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 [...]

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JavaScript libraries: jQuery vs. ExtJS

Often I have been asked which JavaScript library I prefer over all other, and the answer is not as easily orated as one might expect. Occasionally, I actually find someone willing to spend the time and thought involved with seeing the answer through to its conclusion. To avoid any undue future banter, I thought I [...]

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