Tag Archives: jQuery

Quick Performance Tip: jQuery and addClass

By Zach Leatherman | Published: June 30, 2009
Abstractions are helpful and dangerous. But the more we know about a library’s internals, the less danger we’ll be in later. Here’s an issue I ran into where I had assumed that jQuery would be optimized for this case, but it wasn’t. I’ll go over my bad assumption and how to workaround [...]
Posted in JavaScript | Also tagged | 2 Comments

Performance Caveat with jQuery Selectors and Live Events

By Zach Leatherman | Published: May 8, 2009
Prerequisite: Knowledge/Experience with jQuery Live Events (new in jQuery 1.3), and the concept of Event Delegation. When developing on the front end, it’s easy to prioritize correctness over performance. Performance is the step child that gets lost while you’re pulling your hair out worrying about cross browser compatibility. It’s very important to regularly benchmark [...]
Posted in JavaScript | Also tagged | 11 Comments

Jonathan Sharp at The Ajax Experience

By Zach Leatherman | Published: February 20, 2009
Former co-worker and all around good guy Jonathan Sharp gave a presentation at The Ajax Experience about a project that he developed, and subsequently passed onto me around 3Q2008.
Posted in People | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

Scare Your Visitors with this JavaScript Gravatar Plugin

By Zach Leatherman | Published: January 8, 2009
Here's a use case. An unregistered visitor visits your blog, and decides that your content is so good that it merits a comment! Congratulations, you've fooled them! But since they're leaving a comment, why not show them a preview of their gravatar?
Posted in JavaScript, Projects | Also tagged | 5 Comments

Selecting XML Nodes with JavaScript (Peril of getElementsByTagName)

By Zach Leatherman | Published: May 10, 2008
Parsing XML in the browser can be a tricky beast. There are many different wrong ways to do it, which can leave you cold and naked in a snowstorm if you're not careful. So, let's put on the metaphorical electric one-sie of standards based code and let the power of Edison heat our JavaScript code like the innards of a tauntaun.
Posted in JavaScript | Also tagged , | 4 Comments

Rethinking JavaScript Grids and DataTables

By Zach Leatherman | Published: April 13, 2008
In the world of front end engineering, one must consider the end-user of the interface first, and above all other things. The priorities should not start with development ease, nor external library preference. The priorities should start with the needs of the consumer of your end product. Evolution of your engineering skill is also [...]
Posted in Interface Design, JavaScript | Also tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

ALARMd 2 Beta, with Google Calendar Integration

By Zach Leatherman | Published: April 6, 2008
Take a look: ALARMd 2 Beta Update: added Metric and Unit Circle time formats. I know, some of you are reading this and thinking to yourself — genital herpes is more appealing than yet another online alarm clock. But to that I say, congratulations, that’s one of the new features in ALARMd 2! Why did I make [...]
Posted in Interface Design, JavaScript, Projects | Also tagged , , | 9 Comments

Tips for Programming JavaScript Functions

By Zach Leatherman | Published: March 28, 2008
This article is about my personal coding style, given little tips and tricks that I use to make my code cleaner and more readable. Required and Optional Arguments There are generally two styles used when programming a new function in JavaScript. The first, most obvious, and least extensible method is putting each argument as its own [...]
Posted in JavaScript | Tagged | 4 Comments