Karl's Archive

Book Excerpt - Table Manipulation

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Packt Publishing has just posted an excerpt of our new book Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques on their site. The excerpt covers table sorting, pagination, row highlighting/striping, and basic tooltips. It also gives a hat tip to Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street and Christian Bach of jQuery Table Sorter fame (by the way, Christian has just released version 2.0 of the plugin, and it’s awesome!). Here is the summary:
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clueTip Plugin Beta 2

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Beta 2 of the clueTip Plugin for jQuery is out the door and on the server. I’ve made a number of fairly significant changes (for the better, I hope), both to the script and to the CSS. One notable addition is the ability to apply a “jTip” style to the clueTips by changing the CSS, setting the new “arrows” option to true and the new “dropShadow” option to false. Here is the full list of what has been changed:
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clueTip Plugin Beta

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

If you’re a member of the jQuery discussion list, then you probably already know that I’ve been working on an ajax tooltip plugin, inspired by Cody Lindley’s jTip plugin. Well, I’m finally ready to officially introduce it (even though Smashing Magazine somehow found out about it and included it in their list of 40+ Tooltips Scripts).

The new clueTip plugin allows you to easily set a link, or any other element, to show a tooltip when the user’s mouse hovers over it. If the link includes a title attribute, its text becomes the heading of the clueTip.
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Automatic Page Contents

Monday, June 25th, 2007

It’s been so long since I last posted a tutorial here that I’m afraid everyone might have forgotten about the place. For the past few months, there has been a little “Page Contents” menu at the top-right corner of some of the pages on this site — actually, any page that has more than one <h2> elements in the main content area. In this entry, I’d like to demonstrate how to create an automatic page contents list using jQuery.
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Half-Star Rating Plugin

Thursday, May 24th, 2007



There was a request recently on the jQuery discussion list for an enhancement to Ritesh Agrawal’s Simple Star Rating System to allow for 1/2 star ratings. So I took it upon myself to add the feature.

Keep in mind that this plugin does not “degrade” when the browser doesn’t have JavaScript or when JavaScript is disabled. The the elements for the stars are created by the jQuery code, so when JavaScript isn’t available, the elements don’t appear. Therefore, if you are not absolutely certain that visitors to your site will have JavaScript available, this plugin probably isn’t the best solution for you. (See Wil Stuckey’s jQuery Star Rating Plugin for a degradable option.)

My addition to the plugin is pretty simple. It just adds another option to the settings, called increment, so you can do something like this now: $('#rate1').rating('example.php', {maxvalue: 5, increment: .5});. If no increment value is set, or if it’s greater than or equal to .75, the plugin will use whole-star increments. If the value is less than .75, it’ll use half-star increments. Here you can see it in action:

 

I also updated Ritesh’s demo page to include the new example: Simple (Half) Star Rating System. If you like it, you can download the files from there.

Update

I’m not supporting my version of this plugin at this time. I meant it more as a proof of concept, an attempt to help an individual on the jQuery discussion list. If you need a plugin with the half-star feature, I’d recommend Diego A’s Star Rating Plugin.

jquery.com back up

Monday, May 7th, 2007

The jquery.com site is up and running again. The DNS is still propagating across the net, so it might not be available quite yet from every location, but it should be fully reachable within the next day.

I’ll leave source files on my server for the next couple days, so feel free to grab them from here (see previous post for details) if you’re still not able to get to jquery.com.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience.

Also, if you’d like to donate a few bucks to help John with the setup costs for the new web host, you can do that here or on the jquery.com home page: