Learning jQuery

A week or so ago, someone posted a comment on one of my previous articles, asking if I could help her split up the textual content of an element, showing the first part and replacing the second with a link that, when clicked, would reveal the text. This behavior would appear in an FAQ using a definition list (<dl>), with each question contained in a <dt> and each answer contained in a <dd>. I soon realized that the solution would be rather involved, so I decided to create a new entry out of it rather than simply answer her question in another comment.

Here is the simple definition list structure that I’ll be using for the example:

Read the rest of this entry »

After posting the last entry on animated scrolling with jQuery 1.2, I realized that I had left out an important piece of code. Actually, I didn't discover it until someone notified me that another page on the site was broken. Can you spot the problem(s)? [Note: the problem is not in line 3. The syntax highlighter just can't handle the regular expression with two slashes in it ("//") and is incorrectly treating them as a comment mark.] See the answer below the code.

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.

Need to clone an element and its events? Sure, you could rebind the events after doing the clone, but that wouldn't be very DRY now, would it? Introducing Copy Events, a new plugin for jQuery.

Here is a quick trick for getting an effect to delay without using setTimeout.

Let's say, for example, that I want to show an alert message on the page every time a user clicks on a certain button. But I don't want it to stay there forever; I want it to go away a few seconds later. You know, like the way they do in all of those crazy Web 2.0 sites.

After I wrote a couple entries (Fancy Drop Cap, Part 1 and Part 2) on creating a drop cap for the first paragraph in a DIV, a couple people asked how one would go about making the drop cap apply to every paragraph in a DIV.

Most of the code can remain the way we left it in Fancy Drop Cap - Part 2. We created a swap_letter() function to:

1. find the first letter of the paragraph
2. concatenate that letter with the rest of an image tag if it matches one of the letters in a regular expression
3. strip the letter out of the paragraph since we want to replace it with the image
4. prepend the image tag to the paragraph

We also gave the image a class name of "fancy-letter" so that we could style it a bit: