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Sometimes on Twitter when people post a link to some interesting content they have discovered, they don’t just post a link, they link to the content within a frame and add a special toolbar to let visitors easily retweet the link to their own followers.
It's becoming increasingly fashionable to include in an area of your website, perhaps the side bar, a widget that lists your most recent tweets, as a kind of advertisement for your twitter profile. People browsing your site or blog will see this information and if they are interested in what you have to say may wish to follow you.
In this article we'll be looking at how we can easily add a tweet preview box to our site that automatically fetches your five most recent tweets when the page loads. We'll be using jQuery, of course, to help us achieve this simple but effective widget, and will also look at the excellent Yahoo Pipes service.
When we’re working on our AJAX widgets locally or on a development server it’s easy to forget that the data we are getting takes time to be requested, returned and processed. This can, in some situations, lead to unresponsive, blank or otherwise boring pages that our visitors must look at while the content is generated. In this tutorial we’re going to look at adding a lightweight loading spinner so that our visitors get visual feedback that the page is doing something while content is loaded.
We’ll be using jQuery to make AJAX requests and display the spinner in an attractive popup. We’ll just load some dummy content in a container and will need to delay the response slightly so that we get to see the spinner. We’ll be working mainly with jQuery-flavoured JavaScript, with a little HTML and CSS, as well as some basic PHP and JSON.
In part 1 of this tutorial we created the initial page and the underlying mark-up of our poll widget. We also did all of the necessary JavaScript work to obtain the visitors selection and initiate an AJAX POST request to the server. We also styled the poll widget.
In this part of the tutorial we’re going to pick up right where we left off and add all of the server-side code that we in order to store the selection made by the visitor and send the updated results back to our poll widget. We’ll be using a combination of PHP and MySql to achieve this.
During this tutorial you'll discover how to implement a commonly seen feature on many websites: How to indicate to the user how strong or weak the password they are typing is by using both a text display and a graphical bar display.
In this tutorial we will explore how to perform a commonly requested feature where a please wait message is displayed to the user during longer transactions or requests.
Read MoreCookies provide an essential service to web developers, giving us a quick way of deciding whether someone has visited our site before and allowing us to tailor the site to them in some simple way if they have, by providing a welcome message, or by putting any moveable elements into a particular configuration for example. The only problem with cookies is not that they are particularly hard to work with, it's just that they're so cumbersome to code for, as anyone that's used them will know.
Thankfully, the YUI provides us with an easy way of setting and getting cookie data, which abstracts away the strict syntax and dramatically shortens our scripts which is a very good thing considering even the most basic functions for getting and setting cookie data are often in excess of 20 lines of plain-vanilla JavaScript, even without error checking that prevents an error being thrown if document.cookie is empty.
Throughout this tutorial I'm going to be assuming that you've worked with cookies before the old fashioned way and understand the principles behind their use. Even if you've never worked directly with cookies before however you should still be able to use the YUI Cookie utility without any difficulties. The examples in this tutorial have been tested on a variety of the most common web browsers in use today, but only on the Windows platform. You should note that these examples do not work seem to work in Google Chrome.
In this tutorial we will look at a creative and easy way to implement slider controls in your ASP.NET applications. This example will allow users to customize 2 controls on the page by setting a slider value, thus adjusting the page controls to their personal liking.
Read MoreThis tutorial will teach you how to implement a very advanced pattern of how to automatically update areas of a web page without the user needing to perform any action or click anything whatsoever. The purpose is to deliver content to your users in real-time without the user having to request that data, it will automatically appear on the page without a refresh since Ajax is delivering the content.
Read MoreIn this, fifth part of the Customer Ticket System, Sebastian Sulinski will show you how to add a new customer page using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.
In my last article we looked at the YUI Get utility, something constructed for the sole purpose of dynamically adding additional script or CSS resources to a page after it has loaded. Following on from this we’re going to take a look at the YUI Loader, a very similar utility with a very similar purpose.
YUI Get will indiscriminately get the files you specify but the big difference with YUI loader is that it has been designed to specifically get YUI files. YUI Loader is an intelligent utility that saves you having to include or specify all of the necessary individual files and dependencies for any component; you simply tell it the component(s) you wish to use and it looks at what YUI content exists on the page, and then adds anything else need to make the component work.
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