SOLAERAWEBDESIGN

NEWS AND IDEAS

How to Write a Basic Dropdown Menu in JQuery

December 26, 2009 ~ Client-Side Scripting ~ 1 Comment

Recently for a project for a friend, I needed some dropdown menus in a horizontal bar which would appear by a slideDown animation when the mouse hovered over them. Since most of the code snippets I found on the subject appeared on mouse click rather than on mouse hover and would need some tweaking anyway, I decided to go ahead and try to write my own version, which I now present here for anyone who wants to use it. (Read more…)

On the (Un)Necessity of Dreamweaver

December 20, 2009 ~ Coding ~ No Comments

When I first obtained Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium, I was in a state of intense excitement. This was mostly in reference to the fact that I was finally going to be obtaining Photoshop and Illustrator, an image of Mecca to someone who had been working with GIMP for almost four years. GIMP’s a phenomenal program, and well-worth downloading for anyone who doesn’t have the money or career interest to get hold of PS, but there’s also no question that it has its pitfalls (the gradient tool, for instance, is quite weak in comparison to PS’s) and I was very glad to be getting better tools in the photo editing and vector department. However, I was also pleased to realize that this suite came with Adobe Dreamweaver, which I had heard mentioned more than once as being a very powerful coding tool. (Read more…)

Image Accessibility Via Alt Text

December 13, 2009 ~ Uncategorized ~ No Comments

I’ve written before about progressive enhancement and the idea of providing, if not the same experience, then at least an equally useable one, for users on all browsers. This leads to plenty of hair-tearing as regards things like IE6 hacks or backups for unsupported CSS properties, but one thing which it is easy to forget is the necessity of being accessible to those users with disabilities, screen-readers, text-based browsers, and the like — users not experiencing your visual content in the generally accepted way. (Read more…)

Even-Length Columns with CSS

December 6, 2009 ~ Coding, Markup and Styling ~ No Comments

Recently I’ve found it necessary in a couple of my projects to set up a layout with more than one column of lengths which would vary between pages (i.e. on one page the right-hand column might be longer, on another the left-hand might be). In my searches for a solution I found a couple of different schools of thought on the best way to go about this, but I wanted to pass along the way which has seemed to work best for me. (Read more…)

Whoa! JQuery!

November 30, 2009 ~ Client-Side Scripting, Coding ~ No Comments

So I’ve spent the last three or four days sporadically making my way through the awesome ThemeForest.net tutorial series, JQuery for Absolute Beginners, which I highly recommend to everyone in the entire world. It’s actually been rather hard for me to find a “beginner” JQuery tutorial that actually seemed willing to move step by step through the process; by the end of this fourteen-part series I felt a little less totally baffled by what can be at times a pretty overwhelmingly complex library. Starting from the very beginning with downloading the library for the first time, Jeffrey Way walks viewers through some simple animations, selector and style manipulation, and even spends a little bit of time on using JQuery to work with PHP/MySQL. All in all a great place to start if you’re looking for a jumping-off point. (Read more…)

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