At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop?
After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and if you have a similar need a copy is now available in the lab. It’s simple, it should work in most browsers, and it probably has the least features of any slideshow out there.
Sometimes you might need to change the address a form submits to, it’s quite easy with javascript. One example could be if you - like me - from time to time is hit hard by comment-spammers. Changing the submit URL on the form with javascript, makes it at least somewhat harder for “automated brainless robots” to kill your site in a spam attack.
The recipie below is a very simple example, but so far it seems to work quite well: <script type="text/javascript"> function doSubmit() { var target1 = 'hello'; var target2 = 'world'; var target3 = '.
GMail and other web applications have adopted a new technique coined Ajax (by Adaptive Path). It brings web applications a step away from the stateless web and closer to real applications. It’s harder to built applications with the applications, but it’s hot – and the most recent release of Rails (for Ruby) promises to make it much easier to do Ajax applications. Before you do too many Ajax applications, do think for a second.
Providing feedback in user interfaces is quite important. If you have a task, which may take a while, one of the ways to signal to the users, that the system is working, is by displaying a progress bar. If you don’t know how to make one, we do have one available for you.
It’s been awhile since Stuart Langridge released some cool javascript which allows you t do client-side sorting of tables in an unobtrusive manner. Soon after Andy Edmonds released a merge with a function to made alternating row coloring he had made. Now Caspar has done a little magic and added (cookie) memory to the script – so it remember you most recent sort from visit to visit. The code is in my pre-alpha markup area.