Over the next couple posts in this series I will walk you through building your very own Twitter jQuery plugin from scratch. By the end of this series you will better understand the structure of a jQuery plugin, regular expressions, jQuery optimization, datetime manipulation, and jQuery chaining. Additionally, you will have a working plugin which will grab tweets directly from the twitter api. This is a solution based off something that I have used on a number of sites.
Double line letterpress-esque borders are all the rage right now in web development. And why not? They look clean and provide some depth to your site. So lets dive right in with a few of my favorite techniques for achieving this effect.
The current development version of Modernizr does not contain the yepnope.js bundle. This is somewhat tricky as there is no error message or notification except in the console debugger.
Here is a simple trick I found out by blind luck. I wanted to prevent the textarea tag's default resizing in Chrome and Firefox. As there seems to be no attribute available for the tag such as resize="false" (Come on W3C...) I began looking for an alternative. It's actually quite easy to lock a text area using only CSS.
So this isn't a new trick by any means, but it sure is handy (Think outlines, book chapters, line numbering...) The more markup you can minimize via CSS the better, in my book.
Until recently Firefox has always felt like a double-edged sword to me. The developer's add-ons have always been a pleasure to use. Firebug, ySlow, PageSpeed, Web Developer are all essential for web design. Unfortunately, my favorite, firebug, has been notorious for turning into a zombie and snacking on my computer's memory (that no amount of Left 4 Dead can solve!). Leave the browser open a couple hours and viola you have a standards compliant browser that runs slower than IE6.