January 6th, 2009 by Tim
No comments »
After a 6 year hiatus, Made For All, the first online publication about accessible web development is back online.
New articles are due soon that deal with accessibility and modern web development which has come along way since MFA was first published. I am proud to take the rein on the publication again and look forwards to producing more quality articles on creating accessible web content.
In the meantime, two old articles are now back online:
December 30th, 2008 by Tim
No comments »
My newly launched project, a timeline of the Vietnam War, is now online.
The project provides an interactive timeline of the conflict that allows users to scroll through years and see key events and related media in a chronological order. This is still the beta of the project insofar as the information is still being added, but contributions are expected and welcomed from veterans, historians and other with an interest in this war.
Information for the techies: the project uses jQuery to power the timeline and the backend data is stored using MySQL and delivered with PHP. The timeline degrades gracefully to allow for viewing in non-javascript devices. Future updates are to include an RSS feed of the latest added information.
The project is run and hosted voluntarily by myself.
December 15th, 2008 by Tim
No comments »
As a child Robert Mason dreamed of levitation – years later he was flying with the 1st Air Cavalry in the Vietnam War. At 14 I stumbled across his account of his training and services at the stick of a Huey 1H in my step-father’s book collection. “Chickenhawk” in me a fascination of two things at an impressionable age: helicopters and the Vietnam War.
I have chosen these books because they tie up the persepectives on some key aspects of the Vietnam war, namely:
- What lead from the French being defeated to the American Invasion.
- The experimental use of Helicopters and the Airborne Cavalry.
- The ground fight from the persepctive of the foot soldiers (Grunts).
- The differences in tactic between the PAVN/VC and the US Military.
- Dispelling of certain myths surrounding the war and its veterans.
» Read more: The Vietnam War – A Reading List.
December 7th, 2008 by Tim
5 comments »
This tutorial explains how to display a list of items from a database that can be reordered in real time by dragging and dropping, using the jQuery library. Moreover, no page reload is required on every reorder. If you want a bigger introduction to why you may want to do this I suggest reading my tutorial on how to achieve the same functionality using scriptaculous.
Previously I have explained how to achieve this in Scriptaculous and Mootools.
» Read more: Drag and drop reordering of database fields (sortables) with jQuery
October 12th, 2008 by Tim
No comments »
See the demo here.
My first outing into producing a jQuery plugin is the limited, but useful “jQuery table effects”.
The current version defines the following features:
- Alternating row colours for readability (striping).
- onmouseover and onmouseout events for manipulating the background colour of the row.
» Read more: jQuery table effects plugin – v1.0
August 1st, 2008 by Tim
No comments »
This is beautiful, funny and worrying at the same time. Giles Coren’s letter to the Times sub-editors about the removal of the indefinite article “a” from a sentence and the subsequent response.
Be warned – contains copious profanities, bad grammar and a glimpse into the tense realtionship between writers and sub-editors.
July 24th, 2008 by Tim
2 comments »
Southern Spain. An internet kiosk in the lobby of a residential block. A portly woman with two young children pulls up a chair and gazes at the screen.
“How come this is not in English?”
March 9th, 2008 by Tim
71 comments »
Demo here | Download sample files
This tutorial supercedes my previous turtorial on autocompletion by adding further tips and tricks to make your autocompletion a much better experience for your site users The tutorial is structured in the following way:
- Introduction: What is autocompletion and why use it?
- How it works.
- Getting scriptaculous and building the form.
- Building the autocomplete server.
- Passing back an id to our form.
» Read more: Autocompletion with Scriptaculous and Ajax.
October 10th, 2007 by Tim
6 comments »
This recipe follows on from the work done in my Scriptaculous Drag and Drop recipe, only using Mootools an alternative Javascript library that I have been using lately. I am not endorsing either library and I suggest you read both tutorials and see which one feels most comfortable for you, or choose depending on the library you currently use.
» Read more: Drag and drop reordering of database fields (sortables) with Mootools
