Stacy Dawkins, the Blog of

Web Design Portfolio Blog

Jun 13, 2009 Projects Leave a comment

Here is my web design portfolio blog that contains some of the projects I’ve worked on recently.

HTML 5 In Action

Sep 28, 2008 Uncategorized, Web Dev TV Leave a comment

Blinking Text jQuery Plugin

Sep 25, 2008 jQuery Plugins Leave a comment

I had a few hours to kill today so to pass the time I wrote a small, basic jQuery plugin called sdBlink that takes the text on a targeted element and creates a blink effect by toggling between two colour values. By default it blinks between black and white, at a rate of four times a second for infinite duration.

There are four possible properties that can be passed into it, these are:

• onColor: First color value. (hexadecimal – eg: #ffee3f)
• offColor: Second color value. (hexadecimal – eg: #2d5cef)
• delay: The number of milliseconds between color change. (integer)
• count: The number of times the text will blink before it turns itself off. (integer)

Here’s a usage example:

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$(document).ready(function() {  
 
    $('#blink4').sdBlink({  
        onColor: '#ff0000',   
        offColor: '#000000',  
        delay: 50,  
        count: 25  
    });  
 
});

You can find out more on the download and demos page I created for it.

New Wiki and More Plugins

Sep 24, 2008 Site Upgrades Leave a comment

Today, courtesy of Wikidot, I started my very own wiki, that will hopefully help me to stay organized. Well, get organized at least. I certainly need to find a way to deal with information overload, so I’m hoping this is it.

I also upgraded this blog with two more cool plugins. The first plugin, wp-syntax, is a source code highlighter which I simply cannot do without, so lets give it a test with a simple javascript function:

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// Load image plugin function
$.fn.image = function(src, f){ 
	return this.each(function(){ 
		var i = new Image(); 
		// for ie always put onload before src...
		i.onload = f;
		i.src = src;  
		this.appendChild(i);
	}); 
}

Excellent. The next plugin is called, linkle, and what it does is allow me to create wiki-like links to various other websites, including wikipedia, php.org and amazon. Here’s how some of these links can be written into a post:

[ln wikipedia]topic[/ln]
[ln php]htmlentities[/ln]
[ln amazon]978-0321396853[text]Eclipse Web Tools Platform[/text][/ln] 

Once viewed on the post they will appear as: topic, htmlentities, Eclipse Web Tools Platform.

What’s really cool about this plugin though is it allows you to add your own sites to it, which I have just done with my new wiki. So to link to the page about Wordpress plugins in my new wiki would be: 

[ln mywiki]wordpress-plugins[/ln] 

Which will appear in a post as: wordpress-plugins. Being able to make links so quickly means I’m more likely to make links, which means my posts will be more interactive. Win-Win!

Power Ups

Sep 24, 2008 Site Upgrades Leave a comment

I should’ve guessed that it wouldn’t be too long before I started upgrading the basic Wordpress package, but even I thought I’d go more than two days from installation. Today I have added two plugins that give me back some of the same functionality as I have on my other, home-brewed, blog. 

The first plugin I installed was Google Analyticator, which allows people to track website traffic stats in a mind-boggling anal way.

The second plugin was I Love Social Bookmarking, which adds a nice little drop-down box to the bottom of each post containing most of the most popular social bookmarking sites, although it should have a link to Dzone I reckon. About six months ago I wrote a nice little PHP class for this purpose. I must remember to blog about it here sometime.

Project Launcher

Sep 23, 2008 Web Applications Leave a comment

Here is a small web application I just wrote to highlight, if that’s the right word, my other web projects that range from simple jQuery plugins to flashcard and blogging applications.

On the admin side of things, that nobody else will see but me, there are a good number of forms that allow me to log-in, add / delete project categories and add / delete the projects themselves. All these forms are written as Zend_Forms and are subject to various validation criteria.

On the user side, once the page has loaded, an ajax call is made to get all projects saved into a mysql database. Once that list is retrieved the list of projects is displayed using a typewriter effect on each line, each one on a slightly longer start delay timer, using a jQuery plugin i wrote. Then, when the user clicks on one of these project titles, another ajax call is made to fetch an image of that project to be displayed along with a description and a link to launch it.

Project Launcher was written in, implementing the MVC design pattern, PHP, Zend Framework, Javascript, jQuery, mySql, HTML and CSS.

But that’s enough talk, here’s a picture followed by the link to see it in action.

Launch Project Launcher: http://stacy.dawkins.iblogger.org/home/

Hello

Sep 22, 2008 Trivia Leave a comment

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I’m your host, Stacy Dawkins.

I already have a blog, that can be found over at http://noetica.iblogger.org/public/blog  which I built myself using the Zend Framework MVC and jQuery. So, if I already have a blog, why have another one? Well, pretty soon I will be rebuilding that blog from scratch, and I am not quite sure whether all the database tables need to be redesigned. Plus, it is all rather a mess of posts now and thought it would be rather a good idea to have one blog dedicated to all things web, and another to all things random.. This being the ‘all things web’ one.

The thought of trying to blog with Wordpress, as opposed to my home-brew blog application, was quite tempting too. I must say that I quite like it. Lots to do though, blogroll, plugins etc. that should keep me busy for a while. Who knows, perhaps I will be completely seduced by Wordpress and instead of rebuilding my other blog I may decide to build something far more interesting instead. Time will tell.