Category: Development

Created a cool news and event widget on the homepage of atlantic.edu that displays both the current news stories as well as a listing of the events listed on their calendar for a given day. It’s housed in a tabbed interface that let’s both exist without taking up very little browser real estate.

The news and event are being pulled from their respective web apps MySQL databases via a simple PHP script. The front end widget is based on the YUI TabView component. I’ve used this component much in the past, it’s really slick. The whole desgn if based on progressive enhancement so it’ll still deliver the info to older browsers too.

Developing a web site for NuLook Laser & Aesthetics. Working on finalizing the site skeleton and doing most of the programming at this stage. Looking forward to coming up with a nice design for them once their logo has been finalized. This should turn out to be a really nice site.

Decided to use the YUI Menu to build around for a client’s project. As with all the YUI components I’ve worked with it’s really well documented and has lots of examples that really helped me to implement and customize it for their needs very quickly.

I’m building it on existing markup (it can also be created via Javascript) so that it supports progressive enhancement. Here’s a very raw example of it in use.

Thanks to the API provided by YouTube I was able to use a script to make REST calls from my channel on YouTube to automatically post my most recent videos uploaded on this blog.

The REST call is simple:

http://www.youtube.com/api2_rest?method=youtube.videos.list_by_user&dev_id=id&user=user

It returns the following:

• author
• id
• title
• length in seconds
• average rating
• number of ratings
• description
• number of views
• time of upload
• number of comments
• tags
• url
• thumbnail url
• embed status

Then I wrote a script using the YUI Connection Manager to call it into the page.

I’ve gotta do some CSS styling still, but the basic functionality is there.

Attribute selectors which will hopefully become official when CSS 3 is passed are pretty cool. They work on most modern browsers, with the big exception being IE6/Win (not that I’d consider it modern by any means).

Here’s an example that applies a background image to a link only if it contains the pdf extension in it’s href

a[href$=".pdf"] {
background: url(../images/acrobat.png) no-repeat right top;
padding-right: 14px;
}