Learning jQuery

Re-posted from Rey Bango’s blog.

As many of you have seen by now, the jQuery Project’s site has been redesigned. It had been a long overdue task and it was important to put a fresh new spin on the main hub, and the face, of jQuery. One of the things about the jQuery Project is that we’ve never run with the crowd or accepted the norm. By pushing boundaries and sometimes being “in your face,” we’ve not only grown tremendously in popularity but we’ve pushed most of the other JS library projects to rethink their own principles and make changes to improve their products. That’s a good thing for everyone as competition is always good.

So, it should come as no surprise by the drastic change in the jQuery website. So far, the single biggest complaint has been associated with the new banner (ie: rockstar caricature & slogan). Again, we wanted to push the boundaries and come up with something that would generate a lot of buzz. Overall, we’ve succeeded in that goal with plenty of positive feedback, but unfortunately, with some very negative comments as well. We actually value both types of feedback and want more as it’s the only way to determine if we’re on the right track. As with any site redesign, you can’t please everyone and we understand that. But we also want everyone to realize that this is a first cut and it doesn’t mean that it can’t be tweaked.

We’re actively reviewing all of the feedback and will certainly be looking at how to best handle some of the concerns of the community. After all, the community is what makes the jQuery Project so special and so different from other projects. In addition, the jQuery team has always listened to the needs of the community and this time is no exception. Again, I think the team is unique in that we *DO LISTEN* to the community and we’re going to work on making the site an invaluable tool for everyone. So just give us some time to go through the messages and keep an eye on this blog for updates.

Thanks for your patience and we truly appreciate your feedback.

— Rey Bango

A common feature I’ve seen on “web 2.0” sites and wikis is the “external link” icon: . While I’m not crazy about the idea of sticking these little images all over the HTML, they’re a great candidate for using progressive enhancement. In our case, we can use jQuery to add the images pretty easily.
Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you have discovered by now, jquery.com and its subdomains have been offline intermittently over the past several weeks. On behalf of the jQuery Project Team, I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

John Resig is aware of the problem and is working with the hosting company to get things resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, Remy Sharp, who runs jQuery for Designers, has graciously provided a few alternatives for API documentation:

• API Browser
• Visual jQuery
• Adobe Air App (zip) for offline browsing

He also has the raw XML file of the jQuery documentation in an SVN repository hosted at googlecode.com.

Jörn Zaefferer also has a jQuery API Browser that lets you browse by category as well as alphabetically. Also, it can be downloaded as a zip file.

Many thanks to Remy and Jörn for these great resources.

A few months ago I threw together a quick redesign of the Learning jQuery site. It’s nothing fancy, mind you, but I was itching to retire the thin veil covering the tired old WordPress Kubrick theme, so something had to be done.

Almost immediately upon changing the font-family and font-size of the blog post titles, I noticed a few unsightly widows (just to clarify, we’re talking about typographical widows. My mother already suspects me of avoiding her; I don’t want to add to her anxiety. ).

Here is an example of one such widow: Read the rest of this entry »

After many months of stellar work, the jQuery UI team has released version 1.5 of their flagship suite of user-interface widgets, components, and effects. This release was focused on bringing you a standardized development API across all of the components, allowing for a more seamless experience when working with the jQuery UI library. Read the rest of this entry »

About 1 1/2 years ago I put together a little “jQuerify” Bookmarklet (and blogged about it here). It’s a nice little tool that allows you to play around with jQuery on a page that doesn’t already have jQuery loaded and see the results immediately. Based on feedback from others, I’ve updated the bookmarklet a bit. Now, it first checks to see if jQuery is already loaded on the page and doesn’t bother loading it if it’s there. Also, instead of showing an alert message, it temporarily places an absolutely positioned div at the top of the page with a message saying either “This page is now jQuerified” or “This page was already jQuerified.” After 2 1/2 seconds, the message fades out and is removed from the DOM. Here is what the script looks like before it is converted to bookmarklet format (replacing spaces with %20, etc.): Read the rest of this entry »